Hello, folks! I haven’t shown my ugly mug here in a while, and i come back with a question.
I recently sold my Ryzen 7 5700x and my B550 Tomahawk to my friend, currently on my hands i have a Ryzen 7 7700 and 4 sticks of 16gb DDR5 5200mhz (not the 6000mhz i wanted, but they were CHEAP, i’m gonna use them for a while), now i need a motherboard.
I’m in Brazil, so i don’t have a slew of options, but these are the few i’ve selected, and their prices, in no particular order:
- ASRock B650E Steel Legend Wi-Fi (US$370)
- MSI Pro B650-P Wi-Fi (US$273)
- ASRock B650 PG Lightning (US$295)
- Gigabyte B650M Gaming X AX (US$290 new, open box for US$245)
This system will be all for entertainment, it will run only Windows 11 and be used for gaming and HDR movies, what is indispensable, is that i have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on this system due to it being lugged around the house all the time, USB adapters won’t suffice, i already have an Intel AX210 PCI-E card that i use on my B550, but if i pick an M-ATX motherboard, i won’t be able to use it in most cases, since my GPU is a triple slot model (ASRock PG RX7900XTX) and it will either block all PCI-E slots on an M-ATX board, or have the adapter card blocking the airflow on the first GPU fan, so it would have to have the wireless NIC built in.
I also intend to have a PBO profile setup and do some memory overclocks, just like i do on my current system.
The Steel Legend, were it not for the price, would be my choice, it has all the features that i need plus a strong VRM setup and PCI-E 5.0 support for the future (which i can’t properly weight whether or not this is a relevant feature), but i’m having a hard time swallowing the extra near US$100 cost over the cheaper boards on the list.
The MSI Pro B650-P and ASRock B650 PG Lightning seem more sensible, i’ll lose the stronger VRM setup and nearly all PCI-E 5.0 functionality from the Steel Legend, on the flip side it seems to me that both it will run the 7700 just fine, the MSI already comes with a wireless NIC and the ASRock has an M.2 Wi-Fi card slot, which i can plug in the AX210 NIC from my PCI-E card, they look simpler than my current board and wouldn’t look nearly as good on the system, but i’m not opposed to using either of them if they turn out to be the better choices.
The Gigabyte B650M Gaming X AX i decided to include for lack of further options, i much prefer the Aorus B650M Elite that costs the same, but that one doesn’t have a wireless NIC (nor there seems to be any dedicated slot to add one, as far as i can tell), and the AX version with the wireless NIC costs just US$10 less than the Steel Legend, i could also go for the B650 Gaming X AX, but that one also comes too close to the Steel Legend in price, so on the Gigabyte side, the B650M Gaming X AX seemed to be the most appropriated to include on the list.
So what do you guys think, which one should be my pick?
The ones that didn’t make the cut, perhaps there’s a diamond in the rough that i’ve missed:
- Gigabyte X670 Aorus Elite (US$420, gorgeous board, but without a proper PCI-E 5.0 X16 slot and the increased price, doesn’t seem to be worth it over the Steel Legend)
- ASRock B650M Riptide (US$295, same price as the PG Lightning but smaller, much of the same features but without the dedicated M.2 Wi-Fi slot)
- Aorus B650M Elite (US$290, same price as the B650M, with a stronger VRM and a PCI-E 5.0 NVME slot, but i have concerns over the wireless ethernet situation)
- Gigabyte B650 Gaming X AX (US$345, better VRM in comparison with the B650M X AX, but too close to the Steel Legend in price, and no PCI-E 5.0 functionality either)
