Something to look forward to: Owners of socket AM4 400-series motherboard shouldn't have much to worry about as AMD is promising performance parity across B450, X470, and X570 with Ryzen 3000 processors. If you're not planning to take immediate advantage of the PCIe 4.0 interface and bandwidth, there's little reason to upgrade your motherboard.

AMD finally trotted out its 7nm Ryzen 3000 family of processors at Computex 2019. AMD promises higher instructions per clock, better memory support, higher clock rates, and more cores at the top end. With the new chips, AMD is also maintaining most of its impressive socket compatibility, meaning owners of older motherboards can upgrade to AMD's newest CPU, X570 compatibility incongruities aside.

Versatility and value are two of AMD's biggest platform strengths, and the chip maker is doubling down on both by promising older 400-series motherboards won't make any compromises in terms of performance with Ryzen 3000.

"Just because the X570 exists, and just because the X570 is the most advanced chipset you can get in 2019, that doesn't mean that the B450 or X470 chipsets are no longer relevant," says Donny Woligroski, who belongs to AMD's enthusiast desktop marketing team.

"If someone's searching for a platform, and doesn't really need that enthusiast-class PCIe Gen4 storage, or you're not planning to buy a PCIe Gen 4 graphics card in the next six months to a year, it makes a lot of sense to look at those lower-tier boards like the X470 and B450, which will offer the same performance on those 3rd Gen Ryzen processors as the X570 will," Woligroski explains.

Indeed, the biggest reasons to migrate to a new X570 motherboard would be the Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 or the forthcoming PCIe 4.0 SSDs. Users looking at the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X might also consider an X570 motherboard, especially if overclocking becomes interesting – doubly so for those holding out for a 16-core model.

If early benchmarks are any indication, there's little reason to be concerned about Zen 2 performance on older boards, and it should be an exciting summer for CPUs.