The cheapest motherboard currently available from the likes of Newegg and Micro Center is the ASRock X670E PG Lightning, which, despite being the least expensive motherboard available, is an X670E board that will support PCIe 5.0 GPUs when they eventually arrive (even the newly announced GeForce RTX 4000-series still uses PCIe 4.0).

If it's something you care about, the cheapest X670E board with Wi-Fi is also one of ASRock's, the X670E Pro RS, available for $280 at Newegg and Micro Center.

As you go up in price toward the $500 mark, you start to see more of the additions that high-end boards are known for: larger heat sinks for the VRMs and, often, large one-piece metal heatsinks that cover more of the SSD slots and make the board look a bit cleaner inside a case with a side window.

Fans of tiny builds will be disappointed to see that there's just one mini-ITX AM5 board available so far, and it's pretty pricey: the Asus ROG STRIX X670E-I Gaming WiFi ($470) looks capable but also a bit weird, with an odd external hub called the "ROG Strix Hive" and a protruding daughterboard for USB 2.0 port headers, the front panel headers, and some SATA ports that may be an awkward fit in some especially small ITX cases.

The award for "most absurdly expensive motherboard" goes to the MSI MEG X670E Godlike, which at $1,300 is nearly twice as expensive as the next-most-expensive board.

This first wave of boards is heavily tilted toward the more-expensive X670E variant (20 boards on Newegg, versus just four X670 boards), which need to meet the more robust signaling requirements of PCI Express 5.0 for the graphics slot.

AMD plans to support AM5 until at least 2025, so a board that you buy now ought to be eligible for at least a few new CPUs in the next few years, too.