I always recommend spending a decent amount on the motherboard to ensure reliable and stable operation. The same goes for power supplies, and so I thought it would be interesting to see how well one of the cheapest ITX AM5 motherboards would perform with an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. ITX motherboards are among the most expensive form factors due to their restricted size and niche application. The B650i Night Devil from JGINYUE costs $100, and I bought one over Prime Day to see if it would be one of the best buys of 2025 or if I'd need to contact my home insurer. Thankfully, much to my wife's anticipation, it's the former.

The cheapest ITX AM5 motherboard

Affordable yet oddly capable

Hunting around for the most affordable ITX motherboard is more challenging than initially assumed. There are various factors to consider. I needed an AM5 socket, two M.2 SSD slots, and enough I/O for all my peripherals and external hardware. That's when I stumbled onto the JGINYUE B650i Night Devil. For just $100, this ITX motherboard has pretty much everything I could possibly ask for without decimating the budget. Although from a less renowned brand than say Asus or ASRock, there were plenty of positive reviews and even some lighter media coverage, so I placed an order, and AliExpress delivered ... albeit with serious packaging damage.

Let's take a quick look at the specifications ... remember, this is a $100 ITX motherboard.

We've got the reliable AMD B650 chipset, full support for AMD Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 series processors without a required UEFI update. And yes, this motherboard has UEFI and not a terrible one at that. Power delivery comes in an 8+2+1 configuration, which is pretty standard for the constraints of ITX motherboards, though these are DrMos and appear to do the job properly. Two memory slots are present that can support speeds surpassing 7000 MT/s. I managed to get a 48GB kit from G.Skill working at 7200 MT/s. The two PCIe Gen 4 M.2 2280 slots are perfect for multi-SSD storage solutions and something I didn't expect to see.

I placed an order, and AliExpress delivered ... albeit with serious packaging damage.

These two slots are complemented by four SATA III 6Gb/s ports for standard SSDs and HDDs, though most Mini-ITX and SFF PC cases will limit just how many drives can be installed. For PCI slots, we've got the usual ITX one, but at least it's rated to PCIe Gen 4, like the two SSD slots. For connectivity, we're not looking too bad, and the positive vibes continue with an M.2 Wi-Fi module slot, USB-C 4.0, USB-A 3.0, and USB-A 2.0 internal headers. You won't have any trouble hooking up the front case I/O to this thing. Then there's Realtek ALC897 audio, which is fine, two 4-pin fan headers, and two 3-pin ARGB 5V connections.

But wait, there's more. This motherboard has 2.5Gb networking, which is fantastic for those with slightly beefier home LANs. This is accompanied by DisplayPort and HDMI, three USB-A 3.2 ports, a single USB-C 3.2 port, two USB-A 2.0 ports, SPDIF, and a few 3.5mm audio jacks. It's not the most extensive I/O seen on an ITX motherboard, but it's perfectly suitable for a keyboard, mouse, webcam, and a few other devices. That 2.5GbE link is amazing, however, and ensures you won't be hampered by slow network speeds. Let's put the PC together and see how the JGINYUE B650i Night Devil performs. Hint: more surprises to come.

Building a PC with the Night Devil

Was surprisingly straightforward

The HYTE Revolt 3 was the case selected for this project. It's a great choice for ITX motherboards with no riser cable needed for GPUs, support for even the largest aftermarket cards, and you can even use a 280mm AIO, which is required for the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X I intend to use. Everything was assembled in less than an hour, thanks in large part to how HYTE designs its PC cases. The company has exceptional attention to detail, and everything is well-built. The Revolt 3 even has a preinstalled power supply, which helps massively, though the cabling is a little too short.

Specifications don't mean anything if the motherboard and UEFI BIOS aren't great to work with. You could have the most expensive motherboard with the absolute best specifications on the market, but if it has a bug that causes the system to frequently crash, you're going to have a bad time. The same goes for the JGINYUE B650i Night Devil. Sure, it's affordable, but that's still $100 I would rather not spend on a product that doesn't work. Thankfully, my fears were quickly dashed with the first system boot into flashing the UEFI to the latest release. This was a painless process: simply download the update from JGINYUE, write it to a USB drive, and choose it in the boot selection menu.

JGINYUE doesn't have anything on the motherboard leaders when it comes to UEFI UI; however, mostly everything you'd need is present, such as PBO controls, EXPO settings, voltage alterations, and more.

After the UEFI finished flashing, a quick reboot took me into the UEFI, and it was surprisingly well laid out, and everything was fully translated from Chinese to English. Now, JGINYUE doesn't have anything on the motherboard leaders when it comes to UEFI UI; however, mostly everything you'd need is present, such as PBO controls, EXPO settings, voltage alterations, and more. It's even possible to alter fan speeds per header, but it's not as advanced as solutions found on Asus, ASRock, and Gigabyte boards. Still, not a bad showing for a $100 motherboard. With the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and 48 GB of DDR5-7200 RAM installed, it was time to boot into Arch Linux.

And we're done! The system boots just fine, and I experienced no system instability when firing up some games. The memory was happy to run at 7200 MT/s, and I ran a few tests to see if there were notable differences between the JGINYUE B650i Night Devil and more expensive motherboards. Firstly, the VRMs run hot, way hotter than most other boards at around 115 degrees Celsius, though this isn't an uncommon issue from my previous experiences with ITX platforms. While I didn't encounter any throttling, scores were slightly lower across the board on the B650i Night Devil, resulting in around a 10% drop compared to full-size ATX motherboards.

The house is still standing. The PC is still running as I write up this piece, and I'm still impressed by how stable this motherboard is while running the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. Should you buy one? Well, that depends on budget, how comfortable you are at troubleshooting (as I suspect official support would be limited), and whether you're okay with spending less than $100 on a vital piece of the PC puzzle.