NEW MSI B550 UNIFY better than X570 UNIFY??

alex h said:
Thanks mate that would be great I only noticed this board a couple of days ago I've got a x570 gigabyte elite but looking at building another pc and quite fancy this board
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Board is up and running, no problems as yet. RAM has defaulted to 3600, will fiddle around with timings once everything is installed etc.

So far so good!
 
Nitefly said:
Just shy of £280.

Still don’t have all the parts for my build get - CPU and GPU to go!
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Nice motherboard. It is definitely among my favorites for a new computer. I hear that with MSI boards, POST is a bit slower. After assembling the machine, would you share how many seconds the POST procedure takes? How is the quality of the 1220 audio chip? Are there any problems with the Realtek network controller?
 
Nikson said:
Nice motherboard. It is definitely among my favorites for a new computer. I hear that with MSI boards, POST is a bit slower. After assembling the machine, would you share how many seconds the POST procedure takes? How is the quality of the 1220 audio chip? Are there any problems with the Realtek network controller?
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I think the boot sequence is slow on these boards because of that error code LED.

I had b450m mortar before, it was pretty darn fast. My x570 unify takes around 15-20s just to post and show me the screen with press DEL to get into bios, and then a further 10-15s to get into windows. The initial wait does seem to be an eternity tho.
 
@Nitefly How's the RAM clearance with only being 2 DIMM? I've been thinking of the Unify boards but there isn't even a basic review of the Unify or the x model to compare synthetics. You may think this doesn't matter but I was going to get the Dark Hero before I convinced myself I don't need X570 and it was consistently performing below other boards and had some examples where it was about ~50% slower in PCMark 10.

Stock isn't an issue which is nice. I know £250 is abit excessive for a B550 board but it's arguably the best performing AM4 board on paper. Equal VRM to the B550 Aorus Master/X570 Xtreme and ridiculous RAM overclocking. The only thing I'm not too fond of is Realtek LAN or atleast not having the option to choose Intel on a board of this price.
 
GregI said:
@Nitefly How's the RAM clearance with only being 2 DIMM? I've been thinking of the Unify boards but there isn't even a basic review of the Unify or the x model to compare synthetics. You may think this doesn't matter but I was going to get the Dark Hero before I convinced myself I don't need X570 and it was consistently performing below other boards and had some examples where it was about ~50% slower in PCMark 10.

Stock isn't an issue which is nice. I know £250 is abit excessive for a B550 board but it's arguably the best performing AM4 board on paper. Equal VRM to the B550 Aorus Master/X570 Xtreme and ridiculous RAM overclocking. The only thing I'm not too fond of is Realtek LAN or atleast not having the option to choose Intel on a board of this price.
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Hi mate - I haven’t installed it yet, will do so early next month I imagine. I’ll let you know!
 
Can someone clear my doubt. I use 2 NVMEs at the moment and they are both PCIE 3, not 4. Would they still restrict the GPU lanes if I was to get a B550 Unify? This entire lanes thing is confusing :/
 
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Nghtmare said:
Can someone clear my doubt. I use 2 NVMEs at the moment and they are both PCIE 3, not 4. Would they still restrict the GPU lanes if I was to get a B550 Unify? This entire lanes thing is confusing :/
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It doesnt look like the 2nd m2 will impact the gpu performance as it says on the msi website the other m2 slots on the motherboard are linked to the chipset.

im no expert.

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-B550-UNIFY/Specification
 
mickyflinn said:
It doesnt look like the 2nd m2 will impact the gpu performance as it says on the msi website the other m2 slots on the motherboard are linked to the chipset.

im no expert.

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-B550-UNIFY/Specification
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From what I understand (if I am right) is that the 4th slot would give me PCIE 3 4x from the chipset. I can get PCIE 3 4x from the CPU on slot 1, however I fail to understand if this already affects the GPU lanes.

Edit: Ryzen 5000 has 20 PCIE lanes. Im I right thinking I can use:

-NVME Gen 3 4X from CPU(slot 1)
-GPU 16x from CPU
-NVME Gen 3 4X from Chipset (slot 4)

As long as I dont connect anything else?
 
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Nghtmare said:
From what I understand (if I am right) is that the 4th slot would give me PCIE 3 4x from the chipset. I can get PCIE 3 4x from the CPU on slot 1, however I fail to understand if this already affects the GPU lanes.
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1st slot pcie4 from the cpu no impact on gpu.
2nd and 3rd pcie3 from the motherboard chipset no impact on gpu.
4h m2 pcie4 taken from the cpu only impacts gpu performance if used with m2 in slot 1

So basically use slot 1 2 or 3 for your m2 drives and it wont affect the gpu.
 
According to the manual they are:
1.PCIE x4 from CPU
2.PCIE 3 x2 from Chipset or PCIE x4 from CPU
3.PCIE 3 x2 from Chipset or PCIE x4 from CPU
4.PCIE 3 x4 and does not specify, since its ONLY PCIE 3 I assume its Chipset.

Technically slots 1 and 4 dont share bandwidth since 1 is CPU only and 4 doesnt have the option to borrow CPU lanes. Unless I am understanding it wrong.

It also says installing an NVME on slot 4 will disable the PCIE x4 slot on the bottom but I dont mind as I will be using a 3080 that doesnt have SLI option.
 
Based on some research that I did it seems I was right. I can use 2 NVMEs Gen 3 x4 without issues as long as 1 goes on Slot 1 (CPU) and the other 1 goes on Slot 4 (Chipset). It starts splitting if I want more than x2/Gen 4 from Slot 2 or 3.

So B550 Unify ordered :)
 
@Nghtmare Yes. For anyone who is a visual learner.

Default operation:

v6ySsL6.png

If you want to RAID 0/run in slots 2-3 you need to specifically set this option in BIOS which gives you:

I3gqdye.png

Effectively leaving gpu slot as 3.0 x16 (4.0 x8 in this case)
 
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