AMD socket

AM4 motherboards and processors

AM4 covers 28 processors and 3 motherboards in this database, across the B550 chipsets and from Gigabyte, MSI. Memory is DDR4 only, and boards run from roughly $169 to $189.

Processors: 28
Motherboards: 3
Heaviest draw: 140 W; AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
Capacity range: 574–638 W

Power delivery on AM4

The heaviest AM4 processor here is the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X at 140 W sustained, which is the number every board on this page is measured against. A board's socket tells you the chip will fit; it says nothing about whether the power stages behind that socket can feed it for ten minutes without heating up.

The useful question on AM4 is not which chipset to buy but how many Vcore power stages the specific board has and how big its heatsinks are. Two boards on the same chipset, twenty dollars apart, routinely differ by a factor of two in sustained core current, and that difference is what decides whether your processor holds its clocks.

AM4 chipsets

B5502020 · PCIe 4.0 · CPU OCB550 is the chipset most surviving AM4 builds use: PCIe 4.0 from the CPU to the graphics slot and the primary M.2, CPU overclocking allowed, and DDR4 only.

AM4 boards by sustained capacity

Best AM4 boards

AM4 processors by sustained draw

Sorted by the number that decides whether a board copes: package power in a ten-minute all-core load, not the TDP on the box.