AMD's A620 motherboards, which start at $85, pave the way for budget-confined consumers to hop on the Ryzen 7000 train. While A620 is affordable, the chipset does come with certain compromises, such as the lack of processor overclocking. However, new evidence shows that the feature may be partially present on certain A620 motherboards.
Historically, AMD has never allowed processor overclocking on A-series chipsets. As a result, entry-level motherboards with A-series chipsets come with very humble power delivery subsystems and aren't suitable for overclocking missions. But, this is tech we're talking about, and there always seems to be a workaround. For instance, one particular A520 motherboard unofficially supported overclocking through BCLK adjustments. In addition, according to a report from MyDrivers, Asus' Prime A620M-A motherboard has processor overclocking to a certain extent.
The motherboard doesn't offer fully unlocked manual overclocking. Instead, Asus incorporated AMD's PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) with the Prime A620M-A, a feature that shouldn't be present. PBO, which is entirely automatic, enables Ryzen processors to operate beyond their stock specifications. Whether PBO kicks in depends on various parameters, such as the processor's temperature, the type of workload, or the number of currently active cores. According to a screenshot, a Ryzen 9 7900 showed 9% higher performance in Cinebench 23 after reportedly activating PBO on the Asus Prime A620M-A.
MyDrivers also discovered that Asus's TUF Gaming A620M-Plus motherboard could support PCIe 5.0 on the primary M.2 slot. An HWiNFO64 screenshot seemingly shows that the M.2 slot can do PCIe 5.0 x4 speeds at 32 GT/s. However, the Chinese publication didn't provide any benchmarks to corroborate the findings, so throw some salt on the information until we get some hard proof.
The motherboard market is competitive, with vendors always look to one-up their competition by adding extra features. Usually, manufacturers aren't shy to promote the features since they ultimately add value to their products. However, sometimes, the vendors prefer to keep a tight lip, especially when the features aren't officially in spec. For example, Gigabyte didn't announced that its $78 A520M H motherboard supported BCLK overclocking. Likewise, Asus doesn't gloat about the brand's A620 motherboards allegedly arriving with PBO or PCIe 5.0 support, either. Rather, the information surfaced from an external source.
Over the years, we've seen AMD and Intel motherboards that shouldn't support processor overclocking come with some overclocking. Sometimes the chipmaker turns a blind eye, but they shut the feature down on other occasions with a simple firmware update. There are probably other A620 motherboards on the market that bring PBO support — we just don't know about them yet.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
