Sadly my previous MSI B550 Tomahawk kicked the bucket and the RMA refunded me the money for it.
Now I’m looking for a new ATX motherboard to replace it, going to be using a 5950x (without any OC), 4x32gb @ 3200mhz, one 4.0 NVMe and another 3.0 one, and full time Linux.
I’d love for it to have a built-in IO Shield, so in the end all I could find on local stores were those B550 options (I’m not in the US):
Asus Pro Art ($340)
Asus Strix A/F ($320)
Another MSI Tomahawk ($325)
Gigabyte Aorus Elite v2 ($275)
Prices are converted from my local currency (yes, I know…), and sadly there are no good/affordable x570 options available.
The Pro Art has the nice bonus of having the 2nd PCIe slot connected to the CPU, which would be nice in case I get a 2nd GPU for compute, but it’s not a hard requirement and an x4 slot would also work just fine for me.
Is there any downsides to the Aorus Elite that I may be missing? Otherwise it may be the best option given that it’s also the cheapest one.
I have a Aorus B550 Pro V2 and it works okay on Linux. About the only real fault I can find with it is broken suspend to RAM. The Elite may suffer from the same.
The choice comes down to what you intend to do with the board. The Pro Art is geared more towards content creators, while your other three options are more generic “gamer” boards. Personally I would go with the Strix, unless you can stomach the extra $20 for the Pro Art. Better rear I/O than the Tomahawk, better PCIe layout and better integrated sound (if you care about that).
The Elite is not that bad mind you. You lose out on the USB C 10Gbps port in the rear, a slight downgrade on onboard audio (again, if you care about it) and an extra nvme heatsink. The plus it has over the other gaming boards is the full length PCIe x16 slot at the bottom. It’s a PCIe 3.0 x2 slot, but sometimes it’s good to have an extra full length slot.
tbh if your on a tight budget (not that 300+ is a tight budget)
asrock is well featured and offer high end functionality on mid tier boards.
well worth looking at.
*wendell isnt recomending them for builds just because there a sponsor. there actually good.
I don’t think I’ve ever used suspend on my desktop, so that’s luckily a non-issue for me.
I work with data and I’m currently doing my master’s in machine learning, so it’s mostly coding, moving data around and training models, nothing really fancy in order to require any specifics from a mobo other than reliability.
I can afford all of the options, as long as it does make sense to do so, that’s what I’d love to clear my mind on haha
Yeah, non-issues for me too.
Oh, didn’t even notice the 3rd x16 slot. Seems like both are wired to the chipset, with the middle one being x2 and bottom one x1 (with another x1 length at x1). That may be an actual downside, but may be worth given its price…
My first b550 mobo was a steel legend haha
Died for the same reasons (I really need to look into an UPS or new PSU), but now they’re out of stock here
