Even with the AM5 platform being the current and future for AMD, there’s nothing wrong with building an AMD AM4-powered rig in 2025. We all have different budgets and requirements, and going with older-generation products makes it possible to build something that’s powerful enough to handle everything you want to do today, and the foreseeable future.
Naturally, if you’re going this route, you’re going to want to find the best parts for the best prices. It’s also important to buy what you need now, so you can leave room for upgrades later down the line. The thinking here is that prices will just continue to fall on older hardware, so waiting it out will only benefit your budget here.
Of course, if you want to go all out with AM4, that’s okay too. While there are plenty of great motherboard options, the B550 series is a good middle ground, delivering good performance and features for a fair price. We managed to see this B550M Pro 4 from ASRock on sale from Walmart for just $75. It was a touch lower, but that price has now come and gone, and this is the best you’re going to see for now.
These are the chips to go with
This motherboard offers support for AMD AM4 3000, 4000, and 5000 chips. As you can imagine, at this point, there are tons of great chip options, and pretty much everything in AMD’s lineup is available at reasonable prices. If you’re looking for some of our favorites, we’d suggest looking at the top four chips we recommend going with in 2025.
Whatever AM4 chip you choose, you’re going to need to pair it with DDR4 RAM and a graphics card that can maximize a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. You get plenty of slots here though, with four slots for RAM, and two for M.2 SSDs. With the latter, you get one Gen4 and one Gen3 slot. There’s also an M.2 Key E slot if you want to connect a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth card of your own.
Naturally, you’ll be able to customize the hardware experience via ASRock’s software library. Overall, it’s a solid motherboard that will deliver good performance and be able to handle everything you throw at it. If this sounds like the base you need for a new build, we recommend picking it up as soon as possible.