ASRock A620M Pro RS Wi-Fi Motherboard Review

TweakTown's Rating: 86%

The Bottom Line

Given its decent price point, the ASRock A620M Pro RS Wi-Fi gives consumers on a budget a solid entry to AM5.

Pros

• + AM5
• + DDR5
• + Wi-Fi 6e
• + Price

Cons

• - Gigabit Ethernet
• - Weak VRM

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

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With the launch of AMD's new socket AM5 motherboards, the cost of entry took a bit of a bump for team red. With that in tow, vendors have now started to out the A620 chipset as a means to lower that cost and get more people onto the latest Zen 4 platform.

For us, our first look at A620 comes from ASRock, with the A620 Pro RS Wi-Fi. This board is one of five motherboards ASRock has planned for this chipset, and, surprisingly enough, they support the entire range of Ryzen 7000 series of CPUs, with a note of possible reduced performance for the 7900X and 7950X, understandably.

That said, features of this motherboard include a 6+2+1 phase design, and as mentioned above, it does support all Ryzen 7000 CPUs. Additionally, we have support for dual channel DDR5 up to 6000MHz and capacity support up to 128GB.

Expansion is handled via a single PCIe 4.0 slot, while the chipset does support a Key E m.2 slot for Wi-Fi modules. Storage includes several m.2 slots, two pulling off the CPU at Gen4x4 and one from the chipset at Gen3x2. Four SATA connections are available for legacy storage.

Connectivity includes two USB 3.2 Gen 1 using the USB-C format and five USB 3.2 Gen 1 using Type-A. Additional four USB 2.0 are available through internal headers and four on the rear I/O. Audio is handled by the Realtek ALC897 audio codec, and LAN support includes Realtek Gigabit LAN and Mediatek WiFi6e.

Pricing

As for pricing, the ASRock A620M Pro RS comes in at $124.99 with a one-year warranty.

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 8-Core, 16-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$298.38	$298.38	$301.00	$334.00	Buy
	$319.00	$319.00	$340.36	-	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 2/18/2024 at 9:25 pm CST - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission.

Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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ASRock has packaged the A620M in a dual-tone box, black on white. CPU and chipset support can be found bottom left.

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On the back, we have a full specifications list up top with the features detailed down below.

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The scope of delivery includes a Wi-Fi antenna, SATA cables, and hardware for securing your M.2 drives.

A620M Pro RS Overview

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The Pro RS is a Micro-ATX board, a form factor we don't see too much of these days. It carries a minimal design; silver heatsinks cover the most important components, including the VRM, top m.2 slot, and chipset. Top right, you will find the four DDR5 slots, and just under M.2_1, you will find the lonely PCIe slot.

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The back of the motherboard houses the backplate and Nuvoton super I/O.

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The rear I/O is quite good for a budget board. We have HDMI and DP outputs for your display at the top, followed by a host of USB 3.2 ports and Gigabit LAN. Audio is at the bottom.

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The board layout gives us front-panel audio, RGB, and fan support via headers. Further down, we have two of the additional m.2 slots and front panel connections are bottom right.

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Around the corner, we have two SATA ports and the internal USB 3.2 headers.

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Further up this side, we run into a 24-pin power connection and more RGB headers.

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Up top, we have fan headers and a single 8-pin connection.

UEFI, Software and Test System

UEFI

This BIOS is similar to past ASRock motherboards. The main menu offers hardware information, while OC Tweaker includes current CPU and memory clocks at the top, tuning for memory down below. The advanced menu includes options for configuring the CPU, onboard devices, and storage.

Further down, you will find the AMD Overclocking menu, and the Tool menu itself will allow you to configure the RGB and secure erase your SSD.

Motherboard Software

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ASRock offers the software above for tuning your CPU. Three presets are available on this tab.

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Users also can manually tune within the software. For this board, it's limited to voltage settings.

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System Info offers hardware information.

Motherboard Testing Supporters

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Sabrent supports our storage testing with the Rocket 4 Plus.

AMD Motherboard Test System

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X
• RAM: Sabrent Rocket DDR5 4800MHz 32GB CL30 (buy from Amazon)
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090Ti (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 1TB (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: AORUS P1200W PSU (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 (buy from Amazon)

Cinebench R23 and AIDA64

Cinebench R23

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that has been heavily relied upon by both Intel and AMD to highlight their newest platforms during unveils. The benchmark has two tests, a single-core workload that will utilize one thread or 1T. There is also a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU.

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Picking things up with R23, the A620M landed right in line with past AM5 motherboards scoring 1988 single thread and 19565 multi-thread.

AIDA64 Engineer

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AES scored a bit under normal for the A620M, with 166579 for the ASRock board.

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SHA3, on the other hand, did quite well, landing 5534 points.

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Memory latency for this board was a bit higher as well at 73.3ns.

PCMark, 3DMark and CrossMark Benchmarks

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Dialing up PCMark 10 extended, the A620M landed only slightly under past AM5 boards. We scored 13115 for the A620M from ASRock.

CrossMark

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Crossmark turned a score of 2171 for the A620M.

3DMark

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Moving our testing over to 3DMark, we start with CPU Profile. The A620M was a few points off in single thread, with the score being 1106, and at the top sixteen threads showed up 8941.

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With our 3090 Ti, the A620M showed solid gaming performance, actually a bit better than expected. We scored 18821 overall.

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Running this board through our Cyberpunk 2077 scenario, we did drop a few frames in 1080p with a score of 168 FPS, while 1440p showed 135.9 FPS.

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Forza Horizon showed similar results but overall didn't lose too much. 1080p showed 193 FPS for the A620M and 1440p landed 174 FPS.

Storage Benchmarks and Final Thoughts

3DMark Storage Benchmarks

UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. We consider it to be superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs on the actual game itself. This test is, in fact, the same as running the actual game, just without the inconsistencies inherent to application testing.

In short, we believe that this is the world's best way to test an SSDs gaming prowess and accurately compare it against competing SSDs. The 3DMark SSD Gaming Test measures and scores the following:

• Loading Battlefield V from launch to the main menu.
• Loading Call of Duty Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu.
• Loading Overwatch from launch to the main menu.
• Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch.
• Installing The Outer Worlds from the Epic Games Launcher.
• Saving game progress in The Outer Worlds.
• Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive.

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Storage for the A620M was on par with past boards. The score landed at 3551 overall.

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Drive temperature during the above scenario was warm but held steady throughout at 50c.

Final Thoughts

Initial impressions of this board are hit and miss. Many scenarios showed performance loss due to the limited VRM capabilities with our 7700X. That said, overall, this board wasn't far behind the X670 motherboards we have reviewed. R23 was one workload that showed nearly equal performance to much more expensive solutions, while in scenarios like CrossMark, we ended up landing just 30 points shy of those same boards.

Connectivity on this board is quite good, with plenty of USB 3.2 and 2.0 ports available on the rear I/O, and those needing more have the availability to expand with the internal headers. PCIe expansion is limited, with a single slot available; a chipset limitation of the board while storage enjoys three m.2 slots, plenty for most of us, along with four SATA ports for legacy storage.

The pricing of this board is fantastic. At $124.99, it's severely reduced the cost of entry for anyone wanting to build on AM5. That said, we are starting to see B650 motherboards creep into this area, with ASRock offering several B650M motherboards, including the B650M Pro RS.