Choosing the Best AMD Motherboard for Your Needs

[Leong Zhi Xian]

• Chipset: Should I go with X670E, X670, or B650? I want good overclocking potential and future-proofing.
• RAM Support: DDR5 support is a must, but are there any motherboards with the best compatibility and performance?
• PCIe Lanes & Expansion: I plan to use a high-end GPU and possibly add a PCIe NVMe SSD. Would PCIe 5.0 be worth it?
• Connectivity: Looking for good USB support, Wi-Fi 6E (or 7 if available), and at least a 2.5Gb LAN.

 

[EarthDog]

Why not X870E/x870/b650?

Ddr5 is required on the platforms you and I both listed anyway...

Worth it? You don't have much of a choice. All pcie slots on these boards are 5.0 and the first m.2 socket is 5.0. As far as your storage, 4.0 or 5.0 will be fine.

All boards in x870e/x870/b650 have 2.5 GbE and wifi6e or 7.

There isn't one that's fututreproof, really.

 

[Iron Bars]

What is your use case and budget?

 

[Janus67]

I went with an x670E MSI tomahawk for my 9800x3d as it checked I think all the same boxes and was cheaper than the x870e boards

 

[Woomack]

Generally all X870/X870E/B850 ASRock mobos are good and cheaper than other brands. This is just in case you don't know what to pick.

 

[SF101]

B/X8xx/E boards Come with USB 4 default for example if you can find the newer gen board for similar price no reason not to do that imho no?

 

[EarthDog]

USB4 isn't mandatory on B8x chipsets. Most don't have them.

 

[Woomack]

Most B850 don't even have 20Gbps USB-C. If they do, it's usually as a front-panel header. If you want USB 4, then it's X870/E or X670E ... or Intel, even B860, as they all have TB4/USB-C.

 

[EarthDog]

Funny story... the asrock b850i lightning we both reviewed.... has it. But only with an apu as it's native on the cpu.

Their specs mention it as a footnote (but only 40gbps. Not usb4. Asrock actually emailed Tom's saying I got it wrong ( so did tpu, lol).

 

[Woomack]

All others don't even mention max bandwidth, but they say USB 3.2. I tested others, and they couldn't make more than ~970MB/s with a USB SSD. I don't know how it's supposed to work with an APU at 40Gbps when the APU is more limited. On the other hand, I had an APU on the B850I Lightning, and I didn't test the USB with it (I didn't know that the magical CPU mentioned in the specs is actually an APU, as it's not described).

 

[freeagent]

I went with Asus X670E because it was only 400 polar pesos instead of 750 for the X870E replacement.

Crazy..

 

[SF101]

One thing i would like to see is 10Gig NIC's become the new standard and skip 2.5 , The costs aren't a lot different imho , and 10Gig can connect to 1-2.5-5Gig.
10GB is basically becoming standard in the server industry already they skipped 2.5 It doesn't seem like much but i saturate 2.5 moving data on the newer 24TB spinning disk drives its only 312MBps/max and anyone using SSD storage will find it bottlenecked at the NIC.
PS: That or give us a SFP+ port and a 1Gig nic instead of a 1 and 2.5Gb nic.