Sapphire has announced a new AM5 motherboard, Pulse B650A WiFi. The board appears to be an ATX variant of the Pulse B650M WiFi that debuted during Computex. Thanks to the additional real estate its PCB provides, it offers more room for expansion slots.
On the board, you’ll find two full-size PCIe 4.0 slots, the top-most running in x16 while the other runs in x4 mode, in addition to a further two PCIe 4.0 x1 slots. For storage, Sapphire equips Pulse B650A WiFi with a single M.2 PCIe 5.0 x4 header alongside an M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4, each with their own heatsink.
This is all business as usual for the B650 chipset. Although most current generation graphics cards use PCIe 5.0 interfaces across the board, from Radeon RX 9060 XT and GeForce RTX 5090, the PCIe 4.0 expansion slot on this board shouldn’t prove a limiting factor in performance.
In terms of memory, Sapphire outfits Pulse B650A WiFi with four DIMM slots. The company states the board supports speeds of up to 7,400MT+ in a four 2DPC (2 DIMMs Per Channel) configuration. These are perfectly fine speeds, particularly given most Ryzen processors run best in tandem with 6,000MT/s kits.
Sapphire explicitly advertises support for Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 9700X. There’s nothing stopping you from slotting in a more or less powerful processor, but the latter is a smarter move considering the motherboard only comes with a 7+2+1 phase design.
Round the back, Pulse B650A WiFi offers two 5Gb/s USB-A inputs alongside six 480Mb/s USB-As. Meanwhile, the motherboard’s internal headers can support up to one 5Gb/s USB-C, one 5Gb/s USB-A, and two 480Mb/s USB-As. Other connectivity includes HDMI and DisplayPort, a 2.5Gb LAN, as well as Wi-Fi and analogue audio.
Despite Sapphire’s plans to make other motherboards widely available, Pulse B650A WiFi will only make a splash in China for the moment. It’ll retail for ¥799 (£81), which feels entirely reasonable given the feature set.
