MSI Tomahawk B550 vs X570

nails666 · 19 Jul 2020 at 18:57

Hi, I'm hoping to upgrade my PC in the near future and I'm trying to decide on which motherboard to get. Both these Tomahawk boards get good reviews and the specs are pretty similar so I'm wondering if the X570 is worth the extra £40?
To start with I'll probably be getting either a Ryzen 3600 or 3700 with an eye to upgrading to a 4000 series next year but I won't be seriously overclocking, at most just let PBO do its work. I want the PCIe 4.0 slot for a future GPU (currently will be sticking with my Vega 64) but I'm not fussed about PCIe 4.0 for the M2 slots, a PCIe 3 NVMe drives will be more than fast enough for me. Apart from that they both have plenty of fan headers, usb ports and headers, sata connectors etc but the B550 doesn't have the chipset fan so that's one less thing to go wrong.
For my use I'm thinking the B550 will be plenty but is there anything I'm missing that's worth the extra?

Thanks.

OldKitMan · 19 Jul 2020 at 19:21

I've got a B550 Tomahawk, was waiting for the X570 but gave up waiting. I'm running a 3700X on it - seems to be fine, one big plus for me was the B550 has two onboard NIC's which was handy for me as I've a separate NAS network and not having to use a PCIe port for an additional NIC was a nice to have.

Joxeon · 20 Jul 2020 at 01:22

If you only want PCIe gen 4 for the Gpu then don't bother with either and save some cash with a B450 tomahawk max as unless you plan to keep the board for 8 years + and then install a top end 1k+ Gpu after this time then gen 4 won't be doing nothing for the Gpu as the only the RTX2080ti currently comes close to saturating PCIe gen 2 let alone gen 3.

DebbieY · 20 Jul 2020 at 08:01

It seems they will talk about B550 vs X570 vs B450 with AMD on Wednesday. Maybe you can have a look
https://twitter.com/MSI__UK/status/1284076530847678464

nails666 · 20 Jul 2020 at 09:35

Ah cheers, yeah that looks handy.

TriSuit666 · 20 Jul 2020 at 11:06

I've just gone from a B450 Gaming Carbon Pro to the X570 Tomahawk, with a 3600, and I happy with it so far, wanted a mobo I can use for several years, and the x570 has the wifi/BT module the B550 version lacks, which is ironically on the B450 GCP.

Just feels snappier and the graphical BIOS makes a big difference for me from the cutdown version on the B450.