I’m currently on AM4, x570, rock stable. Would have liked to postpone upgrading until Zen5/b750 or Intel gets it together again. However prices are going up pretty quickly now…
So I checked the main brands MSI/Asus/Asrock/Giggles and find that most boards are skimping a lot on the rear IO, unless you want to fork over lots of euros. Also, looking at the reviews on Amazon et al, it seems am5/DDR5 is still not stable at all. I’d have expected it to be a year after launch but…
Any advice on what boards/brand to specifically avoid or get - stability being the important thing? Or just wait anyway because they’re all bad and see what b750 brings and suck up the higher cost?
My X670E ProArt has yet to fail and supports ECC memory, so that might be good if you just want a cheap workstation, but it’s still a consumer platform.
I am a consumer. This will be a gaming system. I don’t see why that should not be a stable system. Has the brainwashing go that far that we should just expect crap products? Edit: there was supposed to be a smiley here, but that does not seem to work. Forums probably doesn’t like my browser…
Well this highly depends on your specific budget and what you really need in terms of features.
Most AM5 boards are pretty good for the most part.
But it does not generally make a whole lot of sense to spend more then $450,-
on a mainstream board in my opinion.
Two boards that i would definitely avoid currently:
Gigabyte B650-E Aorus Master rev 1.0
There has been a batch of those boards that had a vrm issue.
I assume that the issues are already addressed by firmware updates.
But still you could run into new old stock.
There is however a new revision of the board rev1.x
Asus ROG Strix B650E-E Gaming wifi.
There are examples known for having usb port problems.
That i read about on the Asus ROG Forums.
If you want some board recommendations let me know.
Then get the ProArt. Mine overclocks two DIMMs of ECC 32GB to 6600MT/s stable and with decent timings, non-ECC memory would be even faster. There’s also no benefit to memory clocks past 6400, so for stability you could just get a faster kit and run it at a lower clock deliberately.
Edit:
This is still getting upvoted, so I want to add a disclaimer. After installing some BIOS updates, this is no longer the case. I can run non-ECC memory at 6800, but the fabric clock is then out of sync with the memory so performance gain is minimal. With a locked fabric clock I can go to 6400 with non-ECC memory. ECC turned on limits me to 5600, but the performance impact isn’t huge so I wouldn’t hold that against an otherwise excellent motherboard. I suspect the issue is on the CPU side of things anyway, my unreasonably good results earlier may have been caused by my ECC setting actually being ignored.
X670E ProArt works well, I would also imagine that Asus ROG STRIX B650E-E GAMING WIFI is a decent board if you can live with the B650E chipset . I would go for that over the ProArt (B650E series) because it has more USB ports, better wired PCIe slots and Intel NIC.
Avoid -overclockerz-l33t RAM, go for something solid like Crucial, Kingston that dont exceed JEDEC specs and you’ll be fine.
Honestly, I have the proart too, but depending on his needs it may be overpriced. If you don’t need 2 8x slots and/or the extensive IO (USB4, dual NIC, …) there is no need to spend $500 on an AM5 board. If you don’t need pcie 5 the proart 650 is fine too and pretty much half the price.
ECC is good for stability but other, cheaper Asus boards have it too.
Yeah, price difference between B650 and X670 boards is insane, especially when consider relative lack of features.
I also considered asus proart X670E, but it costed more that 2x more than run of mill b650 board (even asus). It costs almost as much as hedt board, yet offers fraction of expandability. That is insanely bad value proposition.
I hadn’t known about explicit ECC support though at that time, so now I slightly regret it.
If a rear io packed with usb connectivity is important to you.
Then a list of boards that i would recommend.
X670E.
Asrock X670E Taichi.
A board with a very nice feature set.
also including usb4, dual pci-e gen5 slots and allot of sata ports.
Asus Pro Art X670E Creator wifi:
This board also packs a bunge of really interesting features.
Like usb4, dual pci-e 5 gen 5 slots. and 10Gbe nic.
Msi MPG X670E Carbon wifi:
This a bit of a difficult one, but i do think that it deserves a spot on the list.
Because it is basically the only interesting offering that Msi has on am5.
All their other boards are either too expensive or kinda meh.
Still yeah the problem for Msi is that both the Asrock X670E Taichi and,
the Asus Pro Art X670E Creator have a nicer feature set imo.
Asrock X670E Steel Legend:
This board is also a nice board with a good rear io.
Not all the usb typeA ports are fast ones.
But who needs fast usb ports for things like a printer right?
The only downside is that the second x16 pci-e slot is only a 4x gen3 electrically.
However it is directly wired into the cpu so it would be suitable,
for things like a capture card or what not given it´s spacing.
No post code only debug led´s is kinda a bummer but you can´t have it all on am5.
At least not without burning a hole in your wallet.
B650E.
Asrock B650E Taichi Lite.
This board packs a nice rear io in my opinion.
The only downside of the board is that the second pci-e slot is a gen4 4x slot,
wired trough the chipset.
But other than that it packs a really nice feature set.
But you get cheap CPUs. Cheapest TR is 1.5k. And you only can use board features of workstation and server boards with their respective CPUs.
If calculating feature set, always combine CPU+Board and see what value that is. Strictly comparing boards is not helpful. Unless you can plug a Ryzen in a Threadripper board and still get all the lanes, it’s pointless to compare boards that way.
I do think the ProArt series have a great feature and value set in the consumer board bracket and provide premium features rarely seen on other boards, like 10GbE and 16/0 8/8 split functionality.
I can testify that my x570D4U-2L2T never ever experienced any stability problem. Highest uptime was 1.5 months before I really had to update a lot of stuff and reboot. It just works. Consumer boards being less reliable is an urban legend. Most stuff is identical, including the cores themselves. If a consumer board is less stable, it’s because of some overclocking going on. If you stick to the specs, nothing will happen.
Yeah the Asus Pro Art X670E Creator board is really interesting indeed.
It currently is around €430,- ish which is already kinda at the top end,
from what i think makes sense to spend on a mainstream motherboard.
But it definitely has the features that justifies that price,
given that a 10gbit nic and usb4 implementation aint cheap.
Of course the Pro Art boards ain´t made with overclocking in mind.
So don´t expect really anything fancy in regards to that.
But yeah that is also not what the board is aimed for.
If you compare the boards, consumer or server…10Gbit NIC “upgrade” is usually priced at 100-130€. But you save a PCIe slot because on-board is usually hooked up with the chipset. So it’s really attractive to save some lanes/slot.
Question is…is it enough downside so you get a x550/x710 x4 PCIe card instead and use a slot? Might as well go SFP+/SFP28 ethernet from an expansion and lane standpoint.
Workstation/Server-board…I don’t care because I got slots and lanes for days and on-board is just a nice to have feature.
Except you really can’t. 28 lanes on AM5 doesn’t even allow for two x16 cards even if you could buy a board where all lanes are wired to PCIe slots without any CPU wired M.2. In practice you have one full slot and some scraps like x1 and maybe a single x4.
It’s not the end of the world but it would be nicer to get a Broadcom or Intel NIC, another issue though is that most don’t seem to be PCIe 4.0 or higher so they would eat up PCIe slots fast. :-/
