I’m not really that knowledgeable about AM5 mobos (still on AM4) but you should be able to get something perfectly sensible for 100 bucks. Are you going to get as much IO and bells and whistles no but most people don’t need that stuff and you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get a good VRM or traces to the DIMM slots.
Then, possibly bad news: Intel Gen 13 supports DDR4, so you might need new RAM.
No, I have a DDR5 setup. Which is why my motherboard was way more expensive than 100 bucks.
The problem isn’t upgrading to a entry level AM5 motherboard, the problem is that to get back to where I am with my rather expensive Intel motherboard I have to spend a lot more than that. Moving to AMD doesn’t mean I want to downgrade.
I mean… back in the days I would never have bought a uATX board. You need expansion slots, after all, video, sound, TV, network, at least.
Nowadays? Exactly one PCIe slot occupied by the graphics card. Soundcards are pointless nowadays if your onboard doesn’t suffice for what you want to do you’d get an external audio interface, have it away from all that EM interference in the case, TV we’ve got the internet, NIC is onboard and as I won’t downgrade my network to wifi that’s not needed, either.
As far as I’m concerned pretty much all of my boards were an upgrade while also simultaneously becoming more and more budget.
32GB of ddr5 can be found for ~$100, and any other upgrade from a ddr4 platform today is going to require new memory.
So the DDR4 13th series folks can stay on their oxidized processors, or they can pay money to get something else. Not much else to do there.
I upgraded my AM4 platform system to a 5800x3d a while back and it’s still working just fine. I wouldn’t recommend people buying into AM4 today just because no more upgrades are coming… but AM5? why not? It’ll be around until ddr6 is affordable circa 2027.
I’m super interested in seeing how intel’s 15th gen turns out. We know it’s a new socket so the buy in cost is sky high as all have argued here (that mobo/cpu/ram is crazy expensive.) I can only imagine they will drop power load to avoid more issues but who can say. Maybe whatever design they are using won’t have been so aggressively tuned or if they’re lucky hasn’t started physical production so they can modify it appropriately. Time will tell, and we won’t know if it has the same issue for a year or so post release.
