AM5 7800X3D Mobo dilemma, why do they all suck/overpriced!?

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I am really struggling to narrow down a board, the prices make it a nightmare. Hopefully someone can give some insight on why they chose what they have or maybe some recommendations?

I was originally going to go with the ASRock X670E Pro RS - it seemed to be about the best 'affordable' motherboard with the X670E benefits. However I've just learnt that you can't use the second PCIE slot unless you disable the WiFi.... well that's dumb.

I then looked at potentially the next 'recommended' board, the Asus XB650E-E Gaming Wifi which other people were recommending as a good 'affordable' X670E mobo.... what are the downsides you ask? Well, it has a crappy Meditek WiFi/BT module - sure you can change it out but then that's an additional cost... this means you need additional drivers (which is fine), but I've not seen much about the wifi module itself. I'm currently using WiFi so this is a key contender for me too.

We then roll to the Gigabyte B650E Aorus Master, which as far as I can tell has all of the X670E features, but is just more than I really want to pay for an 'affordable' motherboard, though I may end up having to... why have they made it so difficult?! I believe they are using a super old sata controller on this motherboard which only has 370MB/s max transfer speeds too, and while not an issue, is just another annoyance...


For the generic requirements I have:

• WiFi 6E
• Additional PCIE slot for soundcard (Soundblaster ZxR)
• PCIE 5 would be nice for longevity of the board, and NVME PCIE5 support down the line...
• Currently have 2 NVME drives and 2 sata (1x hdd, 1x old ssd) - will be switching one of the NVME's out with a SN850X / 990 Pro at the time of upgrade.
• Planning to run 7800X3D with 6000CL30 RAM and likely the Thermalright Peerless Assassin and move away from my Corsair Platinum 140i cooler.

Hardware Unboxed had a great comparison of the X670E boards but their B650 comparison isn't out yet. Is there any board I'm missing which doesn't have a downside and is reasonably priced?? VRM cooling in some of the X670's is also horrendous so skipped the very entry level ones.

Ideally I'd not pay over £350, but it seems I'm really struggling to narrow down something that will do everything that doesn't suck in one area or another. I had read the Asus boards have big problems recently, and lots of the cheaper ones also suffer with huge VRM temps due to shoddy cooling designs, some of which don't even have the 2 banks of VRM's joined up for cooling!

Please help lol.

 

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I went for a Asus B650E-E (~£350).
using:
7950X
32GB 5600 C36 EXPO
2*M.2 (1 gen 4 and 1 gen 3), the board has 4 slots, 2 gen 5(second gen 5 slot drops GPU to 8x if used), 2 gen 4.
3* SATA SSD's
6900XT
SoundBlaster Z in bottom PCI-e slot.

Not noticed any issues yet, its at the top of the B650 price range but has more features than most sub £500 X670 boards.

That came up in my list as one to research, thanks I'll take a look

 

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I have not tried the WIFI as my rooter is on top of the PC so I disable WIFI/Bluetooth in the BIOS.

I just realised now I typo'd the Asus ROG Strix B650E-E Gaming WiFi in the OP and it was exactly that I looked at with the MediTek wifi/BT module updated OP with the 'correct' name.

 

[Addicted]

I went with

Gigabyte B650 Aorus Pro AX​

not sure if it fits your exact req'ments


(£287.21)

It looks pretty decent but the lack of PCIE 5.0 is a bit of a shame

It's amazing really - £287 even last generation would have got you so much more for your money, even just looking at the board design you can see it's quite bare.

 

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It's a heckin leap of faith that AMD will give us worthwhile CPU upgrades as the next gen. AFAIK they've only committed to 2024, which may only be the 8000 series... if it turns out not to be very significant and all the 7000 owners skip it, then we're going to feel pretty shafted when we could have gotten something much cheaper from team blue!



I think we're literally building the same system - I already have the ram on my desk because I spotted an offer (though I may have gotten the XMP version and have to tap in the timings manually) I was planning 990 Pro but the excessive wear debacle put me off so SN850X it is.

At the moment I'm favouring the Asus ROG Strix B650-A, partly because it is silver/white, and partly because it's not going to outright suck. I tend to play games that don't demand more than a midrange GPU to max them out, so I don't particularly feel a need for PCI-E 5. Meanwhile modern CPUs just don't appeal to me for overclocking; at most I'll try some casual undervolting and see where it boosts itself to, so midrange VRMs will do me fine.

That said I could probably be talked into an X670. I'd love the new Crosshair Gene, but it's still £150 overpriced, after already being reduced £100 from its launch price. Much as I like the engineering on the m.2 slots to find room for 3 on an mATX board. It's a beautiful thing, it's just not worth its price unless I was absolutely determined to build mATX - and I think I want a Fractal North... if it ever actually... exists.

Its insanely tough isn't it?
I'm still undecided thus far - I ended up picking up a 990 Pro last night for £142 (2Tb) with some insane deal that came up, it looks like firmware updates fixed the wear issues at least, and I can just use the Samsung Migration tool to copy everything across.

 

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https://www.asus.com/uk/motherboards-components/motherboards/tuf-gaming/tuf-gaming-x670e-plus/

I've been running this. Any good to you?

Sadly it has no wifi, but the wifi variant seems to have really bad VRM cooling and is one of the hottest boards out there. Though, I don't see any other negatives at least (though I'd need to check to make sure you can run the other PCIE slot without disabling wifi like some of the boards do - what a con), it has PCIE5 and the other bells and whistles!

 

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If you need some temperature readings let me know. I've not aware of bad VRM temps. News to me.

I have it installed in a 5000D airflow case and everything seems pretty happy as far as temps go.

No worries! I think to be fair the loads even gaming are probably much less than this specific scenario anyway, but I was taking temps from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibNjPksgaOA



and as a rough comparison I was comparing price versus base features (wifi, pcie5, nvme slots) here:

 

[Addicted]

By any chance have you seen this one from MSI? It wasn't available at the time when I was buying, but it might have ended up on my short list if it was. https://uk.msi.com/Motherboard/MAG-X670E-TOMAHAWK-WIFI

This is a new one to me and looks like it might actually be about the best entry-mid level board!?

I'll do a bit more research but thank you for this, it's the first time I've come across it - it looks like it's not in stock at many places so far but as far as I can see it ticks all the boxes!?

It's a bit lacking on the PCIE lane usage and total USB ports, but I don't think either of those are considerations I care about luckily (both have enough for what I need). I'll do some research on this thank you

 

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All good. Hope it works out dude.

I've had a look and it looks ideal, but I can't find it sold anywhere only one place in the US, I wonder if it's just too new or shops are wary of stocking it and losing out on the more expensive boards not selling!?

How bizarre that it's just so under the radar lol.

 

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You do not need pci-e 5.0.

While true, I plan to keep the setup for many years at which point I may. Given the cost of any B650/X670 board, the 'cost' of ensuring I have it is very little so it'd seem silly to not bother.

If I can find the MSI MAG X670E TOMAHAWK WIFI in stock somewhere I will probably go with this, it looks like it maybe filtering into stock over the next week or so at various places, I've found it on a load of german sites that now because of brexit do not ship into the UK, so it's going to be a waiting game I think for me!

 

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Unless you’re buying the future equivalent of a 6500XT which uses half the pci-e lanes, I still highly highly doubt it.

99% of People don’t fully make use of version 4.0 of the standard yet, let alone the 5.0 standard.

I'm currently on a 3090 so you never know

 

[Addicted]

So I gave in and went with the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E-PLUS WIFI, I found it at a reasonable price nearly £40 less than everywhere else so it felt like a no brainer given the feature set. I searched low and high for the MSI Tomahawk but the fact of the matter is it's just not in the UK yet - there's some random EU/US shops that have it, but the import and warranty hassles didn't seem worth it.

Thanks @01001101 for the recommendation

It'll be paired up with a 7800X3D (presuming I can get one on launch, I hope so lol), G.Skill 6000Mhz CL30 ram, 3090FE, Creative ZxR soundcard, Samsung 990Pro and housed in a new Fractal Torrent Compact. Gonna go with the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 too, though the black has just gone out of stock so I may have to put up with grey/silver and hope it matches with the FE, but that's really only on Amazon so I have time at least to order that.

 

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Tbh I feel like they get overly game-ified and branded. I don't really want camouflage patterns, or "for those who dare", or extra industrial visuals. I just want it to be neat and tidy so I can have a windowed case and it looks like it belongs to an adult...

I actually quite like the optics of the Asus Prime B650-Plus, but I imagine it'll be like all the other Primes; cheap components and bad VRM thermals. Unfortunately it's another of those boards that has zero reviews, so there's nothing to persuade me otherwise.

Edit: found a Prime B650-Plus VRM review. 101 degrees under stress testing. Yikes. Wouldn't touch that for anything above a basic business desktop for word processing.

Edit edit: why do none of the Asus ROG boards say they will work with my 2x32gb G.Skill 6000 c30?

I'll let you know if the ram works with the TUF I mentioned earlier in the thread when it all arrives, you'd hope so but I guess we'll see!

Honestly the whole motherboard ecosystem and pricing is such a mess in this generation it's laughable people are even buying it (I guess we're suckers), I feel like it's never been this tight (in terms of features vs price) or complicated to just get a selection of parts and they'll work as you intend.

 

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Personally I don’t know anyone who’s using Wi-Fi on their desktop computer.

I am, it was one of my criteria currently!

 

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My worry with the Asus boards is the network chipset is that dodgy Intel one that seems to be causing a lot of issues.

How much slower are the m.2 slots on the chipset? I was planning on putting a couple of WD SN850X drives there.

My memory isn't on either of the QVL lists...

The ASUS TUF X670E-PLUS WIFI has the Realtek controller if that helps (0 issues for me so far, using ethernet+wifi), and the 'better' Realtek audio than the MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk.

My only criticism is the bios, I updated to 1408 last weekend and had a whole host of issues so I rolled back. This may just be an AM5 thing, an ASUS thing, or whatever I'm not sure, but I'm all back to working good and will leave it on 1406 for the forseeable future. Memory @ EXPOII (even though it's not QVL - G.Skill Trident Z5 6000Mhz CL30), Undervolted with a -20 PBO curve on all cores and temps/wattage are perfect. It doesn't have an LED display for 'error' codes, but it does have multiple different coloured LED's that go through the 'POST' steps to at least indicate what component could be at fault.