New Delhi, Aug. 22 -- If you're shopping for an affordable AM5 motherboard, you'll want to listen up. AMD has officially phased out its B650 chipset in favour of the newer B850. Stores will sell off existing stock over the next few months, after that, expect B850 to dominate the mainstream segment.

At first glance, B850 looks like B650's twin, both are based on the same Promontory 21 silicon. But under the hood, there's a key upgrade. The B650 offered optional PCIe 5.0 support for NVMe storage. B850 makes it mandatory. That means every new B850 board will handle the fastest SSDs out of the box.

For PC builders chasing the latest speed without jumping to high-end chipsets, that's a meaningful difference. GPU PCIe 5.0 remains optional, ve...