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AMD has officially lifted the lid on its latest entry-level chipset designed for its Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 and 4000 processors, the A520 chipset.

Following AMD's mid-tier B550 chipset launch a few months back, A520 brings up the bottom of AMD's now fully-modernized chipset stack, dialing down on things like PCIe speeds to allow its board partners to build more budget-friendly Ryzen 3000/4000 motherboards.

Overall, A520 offers up to twenty-six available PCIe 3.0 lanes available when paired with a Ryzen 3000 processor, with twenty of these coming directly from the CPU. And, wasting no time, numerous vendors, including ASUS, ASRock, GIGABYTE, MSI, and Biostar have already unveiled some of their entry-level A520 boards.

A520 Chipset, The A-Team For Value

The Zen 2 architecture, which is the foundation of AMD's latest Ryzen series of processors, has been its most popular series of processors to date. One of the marquee features of the B550 and X570 chipsets is PCIe 4.0, which, although it hasn't been fully utilized in devices like video cards and storage at present, it is still a popular feature that users hope will future-proof their systems for years to come. The A520 chipset, in turn, drops support for PCIe 4.0 speeds entirely in favor of PCIe 3.0, which is relatively easier to wire for and gives extra scope for the motherboard vendors to save costs compared to B550 and X570. The chipset officially represents AMD's now current-generation entry-level pathway, and as always, is based around AMD's AM4 socket.

Overall, the limitation in PCIe speeds for A520 is board-wide. Along with the chipset itself being limited to PCIe 3.0 support for both downstream and upstream, Ryzen processors will cap their on-chip PCIe lanes to PCIe 3.0 speeds when paired with an A520 motherboard.

Further cutting PCIe-related costs, with A520 AMD offers less scope for lane allocation compared to B550 and X570, which allows vendors reduce the number of components required. There are only a couple of avenues in which vendors can configure their boards, such as selecting between using two PCIe 3.0 x1 slots or two SATA ports. 

Meanwhile, A520 also supports a couple of different configuration options with the 4 high-speed storage lanes coming from the host CPU. This includes building a full-fledged PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot, two PCIe 3.0 x2 M.2 slots, or a PCIe 3.0 x2 M.2 slot with two additional SATA ports.

• CPU
  • x4 PCIe 3.0 NVMe
    
  • x2 PCIe 3.0 NVMe + 2 x SATA
    
  • x2 PCIe 3.0 NVMe + x2 PCIe 3.0 NVMe
    
• Chipset
  • 4x PCIe 3.0 + 2x PCIe 3.0
    
  • 4x PCIe 3.0 + 2 SATA
    

The remaining PCIe lanes from the CPU, as always, are divided between a full-length PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, and a PCIe 3.0 x4 link between the CPU and the chipset.

As for USB connectivity, A520 offers support for up to four USB 3.2 G2 ports from the CPU. Meanwhile the chipset itself adds another USB 3.2 G2 port, two USB 3.2 G1 ports, and six USB 2.0 ports.
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