Deep nerd braincheck - ProArt B650 Vs x670 capability check

katie279

katie279

katie279

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Hey all,

Need a deep review of these two motherboards as I'm getting a bit lost.

They seem to receive very good reviews, but I'm also seeing reviews bemoaning about how motherboards have increased from a £150 item ten years ago to something pushing £600-750 in some cases without any increase in actual benefit...


www.asus.com

ProArt B650-Creator | Motherboards | ASUS UK

ProArt B650-Creator uses the AMD Ryzen™ 7000 Series for 3D rendering, video editing & VFX production with PCIe® 5.0, DDR5 support, dual LAN and three M.2 slots.
www.asus.com www.asus.com

www.asus.com

ProArt X670E-CREATOR WIFI｜Motherboards｜ASUS United Kingdom

Built for creators, ProArt X670E-Creator WiFi features 16+2 power stages (70A), PCIe® 5.0, DDR5 support, USB4®, 10 Gb & 2.5 Gb LAN, WiFi 6E and four M.2 slots
www.asus.com www.asus.com

Wanting to use it for photos, videos, 3d graphics etc - these tend to really use up the motherboard capabilities (eg ram, GPU, CPU threads, drive speed etc). Planning on 128gb ram, 8tb (have 2 x 2tb firecuda), have a 4090 24gb and thinking a 7950x to max out the cores.

At one level, I think I've got fairly standard motherboard needs, ie:
- able to take latest AMD CPU
- able to take 128gb ram
- 4 x nvme slots
- able to fit a 4090
- have latest usb transfer speeds

However a lot of stuff seems to be 'below the waterline' of these specs, eg does the pcie slots have enough bandwidth, can the nvme slots run at higher speeds (mine are 7300), can it efficiently use the ram and how many usb drives are actually high speed.

So questions for the resident Uber brains:
1) Are these ProArt motherboards significantly better for this sort of art use (ie will I see the benefit) ?

2) Is the x670 worth it over the b650? Seen some reviews saying the b650 is a better bang for buck and very limited benefit of the x670.

3) Is there any nerd tips that I need to bear in mind - eg I've seen reviews that talk about how some motherboards like this inefficiently share channels or have other odd limitations that are beyond my simple mind!

4) Any other motherboards worth considering?
 
Thanks, good advice - this is the sort of feel I get. In all honesty it does seem like motherboards have lost the plot - they are increasingly a mess of hidden constraints on other components (eg PCI slots all a muddle of different formats in the same mb, USB formats a muddle, M2 slots a muddle etc). I do think we'd be better off if they gave up and just reverted to focusing on just PCIex slots and let us pick/upgrade the usb, m2 etc ourselves as it's a mess! Rant over.

Your point on USB 4 is a case in point as it's a muddle comparing it with USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (even the latter's naming tells it all!)

Ideally I'd just like like a motherboard with high USB transfer speeds and no bottlenecks, B650E-E does look nice as you say, if there was one with USB 4, that'd be perfect I suspect...!
 
Good lord, it's such a mess - MB manufacturers just seem to have adopted this 'used car salesman' approach to their upgrades - ie they'll all list 128gb ram, 4x m2 slots, USB 4, PCIEx16 etc, but only one slot actually does this...and then only under certain conditions....and then it'll throttle something else.... it's just a tiresome process. I don't know if the smart engineers moved onto GPUs or something a decade ago, but boy is it a muddle!

Was quite keen on AMD for the thread counts and better energy usage, but then limiting to 64GB has an effect on the video/rendering stuff.... should I look at Intel or is there anyone who's pieced this mess together (ie what RAM I can get)

In the video you posted, someone's got two 2x32gb kits of corsair CMK64GX5M2B5200Z40 (5200 mts c40) running - which I think would be reasonable - I suspect I'm most commonly throttled by RAM volume, rather than RAM speed, so that might be ok?!
 
Hmm that's a handy article - missed that at Puget.

I'll definitely be limited for rendering which eats the RAM for breakfast, but that suggests I might get away with 64gb for video work - maybe I should settle for that for now. Annoyingly no 64gb ram sticks on the market yet, so not an easy upgrade in future!

Good advice as always Tetras, much appreciated!

So thinking:

4090 (already bought)
64gb RAM
4 x 2tb Firecuda @ 7300mb/s (bought)
7950x

Just need to pin down the motherboard that'll actually do what it says on the box ;)

Any recommendations welcome - definitely be nice to have super high speed USB as constantly transferring stuff - can live with 2.5gb ethernet as NAS backups can run overnight etc, but USB is more key
 
That's a really sensible suggestion - would allow me to ultimately upgrade to 192gb at some point if better motherboards get released.... will have a hunt!

Now just need to find a motherboard that actually supports everything - esp decent USB speeds...!

As an aside it's quite hard to use Overclockers.co.uk given how fragmented the PC specs have become - eg can't filter by 48gb ram anywhere, can't filter motherboards by USB4 etc - don't know if I'm missing something, but makes it trickier to sort through motherboards - would be great if there was some sort of reliable benchmarking/spec site for these sorts of things...
 
Alternative I was musing is whether I get a USB pci card to run (esp given they keep upgrading speeds every year!) - is there any gotchas or recommended cards for this? Ideally it'd have a decent number of ports (eg 4) and that'd do nicely
 
Ah very useful - so plan of going with 2 x 48gb seems a neat solution for now then and a easy couple of extra sticks with a bios update in future....

And good to see add-on cards coming - sounds like your recommended MB above might be a good solution then?!?
 
Ah quite right, losing my marbles!

Ok that's the winner at the moment unless you or anyone else has a better suggestion....!
 
Hmm, yeah I saw some of them doing this which I think could start thottling the M2 drives @ 7300 which would be silly.

Is this one any better?
www.overclockers.co.uk

MSI Pro X670-P WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 ATX Motherboard

Order MSI Pro X670-P WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 ATX Motherboard now online and benefit from fast delivery.
www.overclockers.co.uk www.overclockers.co.uk

(Seems to have X4 for all the M2 drives)
 
Armageus said:
If you're actually considering the X670 Proart then it might be worth looking at a Threadripper, as the motherboard cost isn't a huge amount more, and you'll actually have enough PCI-E lanes to not have to worry with e.g. 4x NVME drives



My basket at OcUK:

Total: £2,039.93 (includes delivery: £0.00)​
​
Click to expand...
Does this not mean I need to spend a fortune on a TR CPU though?! (Ie £2k-10k) Or do they work with ordinary chips?!?
 
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Ah good, that feels like a contender then - seems reasonable value, but has the essentials....?
 
Yeah good advice, I'd thought through that and think it's pretty unlikely/impossible I'd ever hit all four in one whack!
 
Hmm, the pendulum swings back to the ProArt - ok will muse for a week or two and grab one of these in the Jan sales!
 
JollyJamma said:
I would not suggest you run 4 sticks of DDR5, it doesn’t work well with daisy chain memory configs on motherboards.

You’ll have a ton of stability issues with 4 DIMMS.

Rather stick to 2 larger modules.

Yes, im aware that motherboards come with 4 DDR5 slots, this doesn’t change the fact that it’ll be difficult.
Click to expand...
Yeah agree, hence 2 x 48gb is a great middle ground. It is stupid they all have four dimms but it doesn't actually work!
 
Tetras said:
If you have a use for those features, it is definitely a good board, one of the high-end boards I'd actually buy, but if you don't need them now and are unlikely to ever make decent use of them, then the X670-P is fine.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I think actually usb4 and speed of the four nvme drives will be something I use almost daily, so it feels like it might be worth it.

Have an AI bot watching prices, so if I see any deals, I'll snap it up...!

Otherwise the x670-P will be very very close, just half the usb transfer speed in terms of impact me personally.
 
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