Expensive B350 vs cheap X370

Hardware Hub Motherboards
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Hi, I’m looking for forward to buy new PC and recently I found out about PCI throughput. As gamer on linux this is very intriguing thing for me :smile:.
What I’m planning to buy:

  • Ryzen 5 2600
  • GTX 1060 6GB
  • 16 or 24 GB of RAM

I only need motherboard for full happiness, I saw that motherboards for 220-190 USD works, but I don’t want to buy motherboard with price close to my CPU! And as I was looking though shops offers I noticed that “high-end” B350 and “low-end” X370 motherboards overlap on price level.

And finally my question, what will be better, expensive B350 or cheap X370 for PCI throughput and IOMMU grouping?

PS. I really would like not to spend more than about 130 dollars.

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this midrange is where you usually see copy-pasted VRMs, so go cheapest you can find. it’ll be the same power design more than likely, so there’s no reason to spend more

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On ioummu best bet is x370-470 boards

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Not related specifically to “PCI throughput and IOMMU grouping”, but in a more general sense…

Up until recently I’ve always paid the premium and bought the very best motherboard I could — so that I was able to overclock/undervolt/whatever— and it’s worked out well for me. I’ve always been able to get the motherboard to do what I want it to do (i.e. realise the full potential of everything I connect to it).

Recently I made my first foray into mid-range motherboards and got a B350. Now I’m paying the price. The board has a BIOS on it that should make a certain feature visible, but doesn’t. As a result of that I’ve had to hack together a workaround for a problem.

I think I’ve learned my lesson.

High-end (X-series) boards give you more control and let you solve more problems than mid-range (B-series) boards. If being able to do that is important to you, then I suggest stretching the budget to include a high-end motherboard.

That said, all X-series motherboards should have essentially the same BIOS feature set, so there’s no need to reach for the very top shelf.

I would thus recommend a cheap X370 over an expensive B350.

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Thanks! Can you guys recommend budget x370 motherboard that will do the job?
Those look ok:

  • Gigabyte AX370 Gaming 3
  • ASRock X370 PRO4

What do you think?

EDIT: I think I will go with ASRock.

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The are all more or less the same.
For the Copy&Paste VRMs (like @tkoham mentioned), consult this:
https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/f12/pga-am4-mainboard-vrm-liste-1155146.html

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I love the fact that only blank row in first table is with motherboard I want :rofl:.

wow, MSI didn’t give a crap and just reused vrm in nearly all boards, I guess I could expect same quality in nearly-cheapest and nearly-high-end boards.

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that chart actually has “doublers” on some mobos that don’t have them

decent reference otherwise though

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