At CES 2017, AMD launched an army of Ryzen hardware including PCs and AM4 motherboards. It also drip-dropped more details about its upcoming high-end Ryzen family, enthusiast-focused Radeon Vega graphics cards, CPU cooling, and overclocking.
The company cleared the landing for Ryzen's launch by publicizing a total of 16 AM4 motherboards and over 10 Ryzen PCs from special builders across the world. All of them are expected to include the new Ryzen chip and will launch after its release.
On the motherboard front, big players like Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, ASRock, and Biostar showcased various motherboards. While many of the models included the X370 chipset designed for high-end Ryzen PCs, there were also X300 for enthusiast mini-ITX systems, A300 for mainstream mITX PCs, B350 for mainstream gaming machines, and A320 for budget gaming.
According to ArsTechnica, these AM4 motherboards are expected to accommodate any of AMD's new Ryzen chips although capabilities and features will vary from model to model. Each will, therefore, offer various levels of features that sellers can tweak to differentiate the hardware.
The good news is that, if a gamer buys one from the new lineup, they will use it until DDR5 and other futuristic technologies emerge. In an interview at CES 2017, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster told PCWorld that the new AM4 motherboards will last until 2020 without having the need to upgrade them as it is usually the case.
For the Ryzen family, AMD used CES 2017 to clear the earlier doubts which pointed out that only the single 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen chip would be released on launch day. It turns out that there will be a full army of Ryzen Chips on day one to serve the stack of AM4 motherboards it unveiled.
To carry on with the FX line's tradition, Ryzen CPU chips will be overclockable. However, support for this will be limited to AM4 motherboards with the mainstream B350 chipset or the X370 and X300 chipsets. Gamers with the A -series chipsets will be stuck with stock clock speeds.
Besides showing off its Ryzen CPUs, AMD also unveiled a technical preview of its enthusiast Radeon Vega graphics cards. Gamers intending to use more than one of these will have to acquire the X370 motherboard, the only one with a chipset that supports Crossfire of SLI multi-GPU setups.
The last information AMD revealed at CES was CPU cooling. Apparently, gamers will not need new CPU coolers for Ryzen CPUs and AM4 chips as previously rumored.
AMD's long-awaited Ryzen processor is expected any time before March. Here is a video overview: