A freshly-uncovered ECC (Eurasian Economic Commission) listing appears to confirm that AMD is indeed gearing up to push out the rumored A520 chipset. AMD has left an underwhelming trail of breadcrumbs about the chipset but has stopped short of outright announcing A520 so far.
The listing concerns manufacturer AS Rock’s plans to launch several motherboards featuring the super entry-level A520 chipset geared towards housing AMD Ryzen 3 and AMD Athlon CPUs. ASRock joins ASUS as manufacturers who’ve seen leaks confirm upcoming A520 motherboards.
According to the listing, ASRock is preparing to release 12 different AM4 socket A520 motherboards. These are A520M Pro4, A520M Pro4 R2.0, A520M Pro4 R3.0, A520M-HDV, A520M-HDVP, A520M-HDV R2.0, A520M-HDV R3.0, A520M-HVS, A520M-HVS R2.0, A520M-ITX/ac, A520M/ac, and A520M-HVS R3.0.
The A520 features support for I/O with up to six PCIe Gen 3, four SATA, and 9 USB (including one SuperSpeed), but no PCIe 4.0 support. The chipset won’t support overclocking, nor will it offer dual graphics card compatibility.
Due to lacking support for more lanes, each of the 12 new A520 motherboards from ASRock ship in Micro-ATX or Mini-ITX format. The form factor should also cut costs to keep the models within the target budget range.
It’s unclear whether A520 will support AMD’s upcoming Zen 3 chips, but it’s hard to entertain support for what will effectively be the lowest-priced entry-level motherboards. AMD did recently extend Zen 3 support to B450 and X470 motherboards (albeit with a backward-compatibility-killing BIOS update workaround), so AMD may want to enable Zen 3 support for the A520 from the start to avoid backlash from the PC building community. We’ll have to wait and see.
According to a DigiTimes report, the budget A520 motherboards are set to launch in September, so we’d imagine manufacturers will up the marketing push in the next couple of months in anticipation. At that point, we should get a clearer idea of what exactly the budget A520 chipset can and can’t do.