AM5 Motherboard without breaking the bank

Cooners

Cooners

Cooners

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15 Dec 2003
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349
I'm trying to price up a decent AM5 upgrade for later this year (need a saving target) so I can give my Nephew my AM4 board and 3900X. I don't want to go nuts and spend out for things that I don't need so these are things I'm thinking I want and also the things I'm not bothered about.
PCIE Gen5 (Seems silly not too)
1x 16X PCIE
1x 4X PCIE (in case I shove a SFP+ Card in there)
1x 2X PCIE (Got a 2.5G Nic in mine at the min)
4x DDR5 Slots
3x M.2 Slots (Can't see me having more NVME's than that)
4x SATA (doubt they'll get used other than to help other people get there data back)
1 x 2.5G Nic (5G is a waste as I can't see me ever having a 5G switch and if I go 10G it'll be SFP+ based)
RGB both on board and 5V and 12V headers (but can use hubs so two of each will be fine)
Project zero would be a nice to have

I don't need
WiFi (It'll be wired)
Shed loads of USB C ports (two will be fine with basic ones for keyboards, mice, webcams etc)
Boat loads of fancy stuff that you'll look at once and then never use

Any ideas?
 
Asus B650 plus

www.asus.com

TUF GAMING B650-PLUS｜Motherboards｜ASUS United Kingdom

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I got a Bgrade for £120
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B Grade Asus TUF Gaming B650-Plus WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 ATX Motherboard

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Pcie5 is the sticking point in terms of cost has higher end b650 boards with pcie5 cost £200+ so you mite as well look at x870 boards as they come with pcie5 as standard.
 
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A single lane of PCIe Gen 2 is plenty quick enough for 2.5 gigabit networking. Each generation of PCIe is double the bandwidth. 1 lane of PCIe 4 and you’re good for anything 20~ gigabit or less.

There is probably a cheap as chips A620 board that would fit the bill.
 
Still want that 16x pcie for the gfx card. Will be either a 5080 or 5070 ti depending how much they hike the prices.
I think the SPF+ cards needed something like 4x when I looked which is why I haven't done it yet as my slot is waaayy too close to the gfx card in my system to be shoving in a sfp+ card (that I think can run hot). It's the same with my other PC as that had a HBA card in the 16x slot leaving no space for a sfp+ card.
I'm surprised there's no B850 boards tbh. I don't mind the X870 but they all have features I consider overkill like WiFi
 
Cooners said:
Still want that 16x pcie for the gfx card. Will be either a 5080 or 5070 ti depending how much they hike the prices.
I think the SPF+ cards needed something like 4x when I looked which is why I haven't done it yet as my slot is waaayy too close to the gfx card in my system to be shoving in a sfp+ card (that I think can run hot). It's the same with my other PC as that had a HBA card in the 16x slot leaving no space for a sfp+ card.
I'm surprised there's no B850 boards tbh. I don't mind the X870 but they all have features I consider overkill like WiFi
Click to expand...

B850 are available now in some shops, X870 is difficult as the lane sharing is all over the place, seems like nearly every board is different with X870, see what B850 has to offer, the ASUS B850-I looks tempting for me, everything is Gen5 on that board, its not that dissimilar to X670E, and no ridicules lane sharing going on like with X870.
 
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JollyJamma said:
You don’t need pci-e gen 5.

You also shouldn’t run 4 DDR5 DIMM modules BTW (if you were planning on doing do)

Edit: see here Thread '9800X3D RAM buying guide by Buildzoid'
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I wasn't aware of not running g 4 DDR5 dimms, I was thinking more of running two now and having space to upgrade if needed later but I'll look into this as my old man is looking to add to his DDR5 and I was just going to get two more sticks of the same stuff.

The Gen 5 thing was just purely future proofing as AMD seem to keep there CPU sockets well support like the fact they still release AM4 CPU's (Id have probably just done that for now if I wasn't faced with having to buy a motherboard for my Nephew anyway). I was just thinking down the line I might get to upgrade the CPU without having to upgrade everything for once.
 
Pci-e gen 5 is up to you since it’s expensive and 4.0 is fast enough for the next couple generations of GPUs .


You can’t run 4 DIMM modules on most motherboards as it’ll drop the RAM speed significantly.

You can manually tweak it if you’re patient but that’ll take ages and you won’t get amazing results unless you have a fantastic IMC in your CPU and a very very good motherboard.

Edit: also, take note of the way the motherboard will handle all 3 M.2 slots being populated, it might drop the PCI-e lanes to half speed.
 
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WARburton said:
other than very high speed storage there is no need for pcie5 at this time and i would think for a few years to come
Click to expand...
Yeah and even high speed storage doesn't yield any benefits for 99% of the people on this forum.

Gaming and even most data intense jobs just doesn't make full use of the bandwidth, what it does allow you to do is run fewer lanes allocated to each slot and still have the same throughput.

e.g., If you need 8x PCI-e 4.0 lanes, you can now run 4X PCI-e 5.0 lanes with zero impact. This is more of a sever function than anything else. The only GPU that would make use of this is the AMD RX 6400XT which runs at half the PCI-e lanes to save money so using anything by PCI-e 4.0 or better severely impacts performance as per this article.

PCI-e 5.0 is marketing and a way to sell expensive motherboards.
 
JollyJamma said:
PCI-e 5.0 is marketing and a way to sell expensive motherboards.
Click to expand...

tbf my board as pcie5.0 and i didnt even know till i was looking what network speed it as on the asus site, it was a cheap ish board but also B-Grade
before i been pci5.0 standards ill have a new system

i paid £100 via B-Grade
www.overclockers.co.uk

Asus TUF Gaming B760-Plus WIFI (LGA 1700) DDR5 ATX Motherboard

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