PC part comparisons

A good air cooler costs far less than an AIO ($36 against $129 at the median in our catalogue), and for a gaming PC both cool just as well. They fit differently. An air cooler needs 155 to 170 mm of height inside the case and can get in the way of tall RAM, so you may need a low-profile kit. An AIO needs a free 240, 280 or 360 mm radiator mount, but it leaves the space around the CPU clear. An AIO pays off on CPUs that pull 200 W or more for long stretches, where it runs cooler and quieter. Below that, an air cooler is the better value and has no pump to wear out.

Moving to AM5 costs more than just a new board. The boards themselves are pricier, $213 against $100 for AM4 at the median in our catalogue. AM5 also needs DDR5 memory, while AM4 takes cheaper DDR4. In return you get real gains, around 30 percent more gaming performance and up to 50 percent more multi-core power on the newest chips. AMD backs AM5 through 2029, while AM4 now gets only rare reissues. Stick with AM4 for a budget build or a small upgrade, and choose AM5 for a build meant to last.

A Micro ATX board is a smaller ATX board, not a different platform. It runs the same CPU, the same RAM type, and the same graphics card at the same speed. What it gives up is room. It has fewer expansion slots, usually one or two M.2 slots instead of up to five, and weaker power delivery on the cheapest boards. A Micro ATX board measures 244 by 244 mm against 305 by 244 mm for ATX, so it fits in any ATX case, but an ATX board does not fit a Micro ATX case. Micro ATX also costs less, $92 against $165 at the median in our catalogue.

B550 boards cost less than B650 boards, $100 against $150 at the median in our catalogue. They use cheaper DDR4 memory, but they stop at Ryzen 5000 CPUs, the last generation for socket AM4. B650 boards use socket AM5 with DDR5 memory and support Ryzen 7000, 8000 and 9000 CPUs, with new Ryzen chips coming to AM5 through 2029. DDR5 also costs more than DDR4, so the real gap is wider than the board price alone. Pick B550 to build cheaply now with a Ryzen 5000 CPU. Pick B650 for a socket with more CPUs still to come.

B850 is not a big upgrade. It uses the same AM5 socket and the same Ryzen chips as B650. The main change is storage. AMD requires every B850 board to include a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, while B650 leaves that up to the motherboard maker. WiFi 7 shows up more on B850 mainly because those boards are newer, not because the chipset demands it. In our catalogue, B650 runs $150 at the median against $195 for B850, a gap of $45. Pick B850 for a guaranteed fast M.2 slot. Pick B650 to save money if a PCIe 4.0 SSD is enough for you.

DDR5 costs more than DDR4 for the same 32 GB capacity, $475 against $220 at the median in our catalogue, a gap of about $255. In games, DDR5 usually helps only a little, and CPUs with a large cache barely notice it. Content creation gains more. In the end, your motherboard decides. A board accepts only one memory type, so AM5 and current Intel boards need DDR5, and older AM4 boards need DDR4.

AMD costs less at the median in our catalogue, $225 against $247 for Intel. Intel splits its lineup across two sockets, and one of them gets no new chips. AMD has promised new chips for its current socket until 2029. For gaming, AMD's 3D cache chips lead by a wide margin. For heavy multithreaded work, the two are close. Intel's previous generation had an instability issue, now fixed with a firmware update and a longer warranty.

NVMe costs more than SATA for the same 1 TB capacity, $186 against $136 at the median in our catalogue. On paper NVMe is far faster, several gigabytes per second against about 550 MB/s for SATA. In most games, that barely changes load times. Big file copies and heavy transfers are where the extra speed actually shows up. NVMe needs a free M.2 slot on the motherboard, while SATA fits any 2.5-inch bay, even in older PCs. Pick NVMe if your board has the slot. Pick SATA for an older PC without one.

X870E adds a second chipset chip. It gives the board more PCIe lanes and roughly twice the fast USB and SATA ports of X870. Everything else is the same, with the same CPUs, the same DDR5 memory support with AMD EXPO overclocking, and USB4 plus PCIe 5.0 for the graphics card and the main drive on both. In our catalogue the median X870E board runs $359 against $228 for X870, a gap of about $131. Choose X870E if you run many drives, a capture card or several add-in cards. A gaming PC with a single graphics card does not need it.