I’m looking for a new motherboard for my AM5 build. Thankfully I bought RAM before the price madness and I have the rest of my parts, except the motherboard. I’ll primarily be running linux and will be pairing it with a 7800X3D and a 9070XT, and a 5060TI or maybe secondhand 4070TI down the line for VFIO for a window VM when I need one.
I’ve narrowed it down to these two boards. I need a board that can do dual GPU and ideally has a 10GbE NIC as I plan to stay on AM5 for quite some time.
The Asrock board has an extra m.2 slot and an extra pcie slot that’s still usable if you populate 3 m.2’s and both full speed pcie slots, and usb4, compared to the Gigabyte board. I’ll probably never use USB4 but you never know. The extra PCIe slot could be useful for a capture card or something else. However there’s the risk of you know, FIRE ahhhhhhh.
They’re both the same price though which is ehhhhh. I don’t know which one to go for. I think the all black of the Taichi Creator looks nicer but I have a solid side panel anyway so who cares what the board looks like. Gigabyte does have longer warranty support as well at 5 years.
If between these two then the Gigabyte board is the safer bet for now. However ASRock will get the frying stuff resolved soon-ish, so if you in the meanwhile undervolt your CPU until the BIOS is fixed, should be viable as well.
Shame really, ASRock had a good track record of affordable-but-quality motherboards.
Taichi’s likely lower risk, given Gigabyte’s consistent history of problems and fails. Both boards are about the same price here at the moment, so no reason to go one way or the other there, though at times AI Top’s been close to 3x higher.
The ASRock murderboard thing ultimately derives from one person deciding to compile failures, creating a reporting pattern which demonstrates ASRock issues are more likely to be raised on r/ASRock than issues with other brands. It’s difficult to conclude anything else, however, and if there’s truth to the poorly supported assumptions of elevated ASRock failure rates the r/ASRock anecdata doesn’t suggest those occur with Raphael.
I’d also question the assumption that if there is a problem it’s something ASRock can fully resolve unilaterally, not least because the OP indicates 7800X3D rather than 9800X3D. As for potential upgrades to Granite Ridge, multiple problems seem likely on AMD’s side and DIMM manufacturers are plausibly partially culpable as well. See the 9800X3D ASRock thread for further discussion.
Considering more typical skip generation upgrade scenarios, well, it’s pretty early to be guessing at what’ll happen with Olympic Ridge.
Asus Pro WS B850M-ACE SE is normally priced closely if you don’t need x8/x8. But it has less rear IO and its mATX. But it has a gen5 MCIO port a gen 3 SFF-8643 port and BMC/IPMI.
After8 months, I ordered an MSI x870E Edge last night on sale in place of the x870 Steel Legend I had used since building my new PC.
It ultimately cam down to the fact that the AsRock had a bunch of other small issues-along with the potential threat of frying.
Mostly- I paid for DDR5 6000- CL30 and the board Hated the timings and would regularly bump me back down. I tried two CPU’s and 2 sets of RAM and never improved, It would fail to post/no video output, no keyboard or mouse connection- a whole set of issues, after I tried to get my speed back. PBO also would be super finicky. In the end, i’m taking asrock out of my choices for gaming- at least for a while I still love their server boards.
The Gigabyte works fine, I have one at work running Proxmox 9.0 with two 5060 Tis (each handed to its own VM). The only thing of note is that you won’t have access to the additional sensor headers (it has 2 headers and includes two sensors you can place wherever you want) in Linux due to the chip Gigabyte uses for those (or something, it doesnt mean enough to me to try and figure out), but all the normal sensors you can see fine.
Not sure if you would prefer more symmetrical GPU spacing for both 1st and 2nd PCIE slots? (eg 3 slots for both).
Both of the boards that you mentioned, can accommodate 4-slot GPU for the 1st PCIE, and 2-slot GPU for the 2nd PCIE but 3rd PCIE will be blocked. 2.5-slot GPU might be possible for 2nd PCIE if the headers on the last row are unused.
I didn’t think about that. Do you have any recommendations for boards with more even spacing? I can’t find any. Ideally 3 slots for the top PCIE, 2-3 slots for the middle and 1 slot for the last PCIE.
MSI X670E ACE - 3 slots for 1st PCIE, 2 slots for 2nd PCIE, 1 slot for 3rd PCIE. It also has the added benefit of using CPU lanes for all PCIE slots. No support for ECC though.
ATX supports up to 7 slots, but I believe most modern boards use only the lower 6, to leave enough room for large CPU heatsinks.
First position PEG clears the dGPU backplate up to ~158 mm wide coolers, maybe a little more if the geometry was really pushed. It’s more that routing M2_1 as 5x4 pretty much requires it be on slot 1, meaning PEG can’t be above slot 2. The resulting additional CPU clearance is mostly a bonus, so doesn’t demotivate the approach.
There are a few exceptions. Gigabyte has one board, IIRC, with first position PEG and 5x4 drives below the dGPU, which is pretty miserable for 5x4 thermals but probably acceptable with 6 nm controllers and light but bursty workloads. B850 Edge Ti manages two 5x4 from CPU lanes, one above and one below PEG, apparently by optimizing M.2 placement rather than using redrivers or retimers. Probably there’s a few others.
ATX boards, yes, but there are eight and nine slot cases. And seven slot cases where there’s enough space for a 2.5-3 slot dGPU in slot 6 to project downward the extra 0.5-1 slot. Might even work for some 3.5 slot dGPUs, though all the ones I’m thinking of would want an eighth slot in this particular case.
Challenge with running an 8+ slot config is access to and clearance of the mobo’s lower headers, though it’s potentially not too much worse than having the upper headers behind a top rad. Some boards, like MSIs with aux 8-pin power, aren’t necessarily mechanically compatible. But X870E Carbon’s apparently above this thread’s price point anyways.
The MSI board looks nice but it’s way outside my budget. $500 for a motherboard is rough. There’s no options locally in my country and the Amazon price (which I usually use if I import) is even higher than Newegg. Pain
The Asus board is even more expensive. Motherboard prices are crazy
Gigabyte B850 AI top. I have used this motherboard more than 10 times and have two on reserve.
Search Mobo maps dot com. That tool will allow you to create and visually see the outcome of using different slots. Using the tool I saw that even when using two GPUs, both Gen 5 m.2s do not lose any bandwidth. As a side note, it has 20 power stages, with 16 running at 110 amps each.
The Gygabite is dual x8, dual 10 gig ethernet, eight layer PCB and also doesn’t have a reputation of frying X3D’s.
For whatever it is worth, this motherboard is highly recommended by Buildzoid…
Search for a review from Laurents Choice for s straihht forward limitation and capability breakdown.
That mobomaps website is super useful! How did I not know about this.
The Gigabyte board is actually on sale now at Amazon for $260. That’s a really good price. Actually incredibly hard to pass at that price so I’m going to go for it. Just going to hope that there won’t be issues with the next gen CPU’s when they eventually launch.
Even though there’s no USB4 on the Gigabyte board, even if I bought the Taichi Creator, there wouldn’t be bandwith for USB4 anyway if I use the second m.2. I didn’t even realize that until I checked mobomaps. PCIe Spacing could be slightly better but again, at $260 there isn’t even a close option.
I haven’t used a Gigabyte board since Sandy Bridge.
