Help with B550 ITX upgrade

Relentless81

Relentless81

Relentless81

Soldato
Joined
18 May 2010
Posts
12,852
Hi,

So I'm downsizing from ATX and my Meshify C to an ITX system, my brother wants to buy my PC which is good because it saves me parting it out and posting parts

The problem I have is I want to upgrade from my B450 and 2600X with 16GB of ram to a B550 with Ryzen 4000 when it's out and 32Gb of faster ram and an pcie4 nvme

Obviously 4000 isn't out yet so I need a B550 ITX board that'll take a temporary CPU until 4000 is out and I can plop that straight in and sell the 3000 series CPU

I'm stuck on everything basically, I'm out of touch with what ram speed will be good for 3000 and 4000 series, 3600 maybe I want to just turn on XMP and be happy no messing around? I have no idea which pcie4 nvme to get it seems Samsung don't even do them yet? And the CPU maybe just a 3300x to tide me over until 4000 series?

Is there a go to B550 ITX board, Gigabyte Aurus maybe?

Has anyone done a similar build and can help, I've not struggled this much with trying to a do a build before but I used to have a lot more time than I do these days and it seems the older I get the hard it is to make desicions!

Thanks
 
That board certainly has capable VRM.

As for memory it's hard to know what kind frequencies Zen3's memory controller does.
Or if there's been much resources spent on that. (with DDR5 coming as next step)
Growing CCX size to eight cores must have needed some notable design work.
And would expect goal to also have been improving CPU's internal communication between chiplets and I/O die.
Improvements in there and resulting lowered memory latency would give automatic overall performance increase.
(Intel must be praying that AMD won't be bringing monolithic 16 core in the future)

3600MHz is certainly good bet on that being pretty certain to be achievable on almost any Zen2.
 
Samsungs are grossly brand overpriced.
You can get same capacity for good amonut less, or basically PCIe v4 drive at price of Samsung's PCIe v3 drive.
 
EsaT said:
Samsungs are grossly brand overpriced.
You can get same capacity for good amonut less, or basically PCIe v4 drive at price of Samsung's PCIe v3 drive.
Click to expand...

Is there a recommendation on brand? I see team group do a pcie4 nvme and I've had a good experience using their ram so ram for this build will be team group too
 
Also which Aurus board was you referring to earlier, there like 20 different models?!

Edit never mind I shouldn't be browsing motherboards while under the influence
 
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Cool thanks, just noticed 32gb of team group 3600 ram is £230

That's pretty big money for two sticks of ram, would it be better to go for 16gb and higher speed I'm wondering if Ryzen 4000 series is going to be able to use much faster ram
 
Unless you absolutely have to build this now, you would be better off doing this when parts are available and the market settles down. Right now B550 ITX is at a premium, realistically it doesn’t offer much over B450 ITX, CPU support is the same, PCIe4 is going to provide near zero real world benefit at this stage, no GPU or NVMe is going to take any noticeable advantage of it for quite a while, and the cards that will are unlikely to be the very high end stuff, that generally isn’t well suited to an ITX build.

As to your questions, until 4 series desktop CPU’s make it out and NDA’s expire, nobody knows what speed if RAM will be best, but just like the 1-3 series, whatever it is will be expensive now and likely cheaper later. PCIe 4 NVMe will yield no noticeable difference over PCIe 3 NVMe, even if it was multiple times faster, diminishing returns kicked in a long time ago - look at the move from AHCI SATA to true NVMe, 7x faster, bugger all difference in most real world workloads.

If you do go ahead, you need to accept you will pay a premium now and some of your choices may not be ideal, if you are OK with that, then fair enough.
 
Avalon said:
Unless you absolutely have to build this now, you would be better off doing this when parts are available and the market settles down. Right now B550 ITX is at a premium, realistically it doesn’t offer much over B450 ITX, CPU support is the same, PCIe4 is going to provide near zero real world benefit at this stage, no GPU or NVMe is going to take any noticeable advantage of it for quite a while, and the cards that will are unlikely to be the very high end stuff, that generally isn’t well suited to an ITX build.

As to your questions, until 4 series desktop CPU’s make it out and NDA’s expire, nobody knows what speed if RAM will be best, but just like the 1-3 series, whatever it is will be expensive now and likely cheaper later. PCIe 4 NVMe will yield no noticeable difference over PCIe 3 NVMe, even if it was multiple times faster, diminishing returns kicked in a long time ago - look at the move from AHCI SATA to true NVMe, 7x faster, bugger all difference in most real world workloads.

If you do go ahead, you need to accept you will pay a premium now and some of your choices may not be ideal, if you are OK with that, then fair enough.
Click to expand...

Solid advice really, the main driver is desk space. With working from home I'm sat at a cramped desk all day but to be fair my Meshify C is a pretty small ATX case so I was looking at the NZXT H1 as thats the only case that'll provide any real space saving but the AIO puts me off it. I feel pretty bad because my Brother is looking forward to getting my PC but I think you're right its a really bad time to build a PC, stock is low or none existent and everything seems expensive and even if I did get everything I wont see much of a difference if any

I might have to stick with what I have until 4000 is released and reassess the situation then and break the news to my brother, or another option would be a complete side grade to a B450 ITX board and keep my current CPU and RAM and my brother will need to buy those but it'll be a much cheaper move to ITX and I can just plug my current HDD in and everything will work
 
The side grade sounds more logical at this stage. You’re going to pay a lot to regain quite a minimal amount of desk space, only you can decide if that’s worth it, but I’ve found people tend to focus on getting things as compact as possible, but overlook if the space they will ‘reclaim’ is actually space that they will use for something else or will they just have a bigger gap round the case. I could be wrong, but a cramped desk sounds like you need to consider the whole thing, not just the PC.
 
Avalon said:
The side grade sounds more logical at this stage. You’re going to pay a lot to regain quite a minimal amount of desk space, only you can decide if that’s worth it, but I’ve found people tend to focus on getting things as compact as possible, but overlook if the space they will ‘reclaim’ is actually space that they will use for something else or will they just have a bigger gap round the case. I could be wrong, but a cramped desk sounds like you need to consider the whole thing, not just the PC.
Click to expand...

Once again you talk a lot of space so I appreciate your responses.

I cant do anything about the desk, its fixed and a custom desk, it cost me a fair amount to have done and I've recently spent a fair bit of money getting it setup for work as well as my gaming PC so I have a vertical twin monitor mount with a work monitor above my personal monitor and my work laptop docked to both. I bought a 60% Ducky keyboard which is took some getting used to but it is working quite well for work and gaming, the only thing left to look at is the gaming PC but like you say if I shrunk it what would I do with the space?

It wouldn't be as cluttered during the day when I'm working, as the desk is in the main bedroom the relatively large PC looks a bit odd but then so does two stacked monitors so yeah, I guess your right, seems a bit daft really when you think about it but I'd still like the extra space, maybe for less cost as a full B550 upgrade at this time, it might even be worth skipping B550 all together and seeing what AM5 five brings but the fact that the new consoles will be powerful than my PC does for some reason irritate me a bit because whats the point I might as well just get a console
 
Let’s just say I learned lessons the hard/expensive way in my younger days. I probably wouldn’t have listened to me back then, and no guarantee that what I say is right for you, but if you spend extra time considering your options and come out with something that works better for you overall, then it’s all good.
 
I was also contemplating upgrading to a b550 ITX system but delivery dates for boards keep getting pushed back and the prices are steep at over £200.

I think I might just go for a b450 itx build for now as it's about £100 cheaper for the board and stock is plentiful. Virtually all b450 boards on sale just now support 3000 series CPUs out of the box anyway. Most of the additional features on the b550 (4000 support, pcie 4, wifi6) are basically future proofing and not things I'd use at the moment anyway.

Can always upgrade to a b550 board next year if I feel it's necessary. Ideally I'd wait but I'm without a desktop at the moment so it's not really an option.
 
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FWIW, I gave up on B550 ITX a few weeks ago and went with B450. It still made for a really sweet machine, and more importantly I could get the motherboard now and get things moving. I don't regret it. PCIe gen 3 SSD is plenty fast and I'm using a GTX 1660Ti for my GPU so that matters not one jot either.
 
With the B450 having confirmed 4000 series support according to AMD, almost everything else B550 offers in ITX guise is either easily added or just a bigger number that won’t have any significant real world benefit for at least a few generations, even then it’ll take a lot of GPU and money to show them up. I’d personally wait for AM5 before dropping any serious money on a high end board, a reasonably priced B450 seems to tick all the obvious boxes.
 
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