Image courtesy of AMD
There have been a number of new leaks surround AMD's highly-anticipated Ryzen CPUs, which are due to launch in the next few weeks and promise to take the fight to Intel in the performance stakes, ending a decade of monopoly. These include the official launch date, images of Socket AM4 motherboards and their pricing.
An official release date?
Starting with the launch date, there have been conflicting reports of either a late February launch or one slightly later in early March. The dates I've spotted so far are February 28th and more recently March 2, with website www.wccftech.com claiming samples apparently on their way to journalists, and an official launch date and time of March 2 at 7am. This is less than two weeks away.
Motherboards and pricing
As usual, take these details with a generous pinch of salt, but Australian manufacturer Eyo was spotted listing several Asus AM4 motherboards, including pricing. Wccftech was again responsible for this find, but has since removed the post as has the retailer.
Asus' Crosshair represents the flagship board from the company, just as it has for previous AMD sockets for years now. This and the Prime X370-Pro both use the X370 chipset, which supports AMD CrossFire and Nvidia SLI as well as overclocking and USB 3.1. They stand at $380 and $246 respectively.
Image courtesy of AMD
The two cheaper boards cost just $129 and $153, but sport the B350 chipset. AMD has already stated that this chipset will support overclocking, so these could be the bargain boards to go for if you're after a cheap, but over-clockable system. They don't suppose multi-GPU configurations though, as you can see in the table above.
Meanwhile, Asus has teased some images of two of its Socket AM4 boards on social media and you can also see below leaks from other motherboard manufacturers.
ASRock
Asus
Biostar
Gigabyte
MSI
If you missed the previous news, the complete line-up of AMD Ryzen CPUs can be seen below and they start at just $129 for a 4-core CPU in the form of the Ryzen 3-1100, stretching up to the 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7-1800x at around $500.
Image credit: Antony Leather
We also know that AM4 motherboards will require adaptors to work with older AMD-compatible coolers or a new cooler entirely. They are not compatible with previous AM3+ motherboard cooler mounting mechanisms or CPUs, with several cooler manufacturers including Cryorig, Noctua, Phanteks and Thermalright offering free upgrade kits.
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