AM5 motherboard round up

hey guys Bill Zoid here and today we're finally going to be doing the am noteworthy am5 motherboards list um so the way this list works is very simple motherboards get onto the list by having a interesting set of features at a competitive price point and when I say competitive price point I basically mean the cheapest motherboard to offer that set of features um now then so that's how motherboards get onto the list uh and the first thing I would like to address is that the performance difference between say a ASRock b650m--htv which is the cheapest motherboard on this list at around 130 US dollars and say an MSI Meg x670e Ace which is the most expensive motherboard on this list at best is like 10 um because the memory overclocking on this is limited by the CPU the memory overclocking on this is also limited by the CPU the main difference that you'll see in terms of performance between a b650mhdv and say an x670e ace is that the ace has an external clock gen so if you get lucky with your silicon you might be able to push the BCL the the external clock gen to say 105 maybe even 110 and then you're going to get something between like a five to ten percent performance uplift in certain workloads not all workloads because not all workloads will actually have that much clock Headroom but you get the idea so you might see up to a 10 performance uplift if you buy something that's like 700 now to be fair there are other motherboards that have external plugins and those made it into the list for having the feature of the external blockchain I don't consider it really a like necessary feature on am5 because it really doesn't make that much of a difference and it is really expensive like the cheapest boards with an external clock gen are all over 300 um so you know you can spend like two to three times more on your motherboard to get maybe five to ten percent more CPU performance which I think is silly because if your bios randomly got reset I don't think you'd be able to tell the difference um anyway not without running a benchmark right like in regular uses I don't think you'd be able to tell the difference so anyway with that out of the way let's get into it starting off with the cheapest motherboard on the list which is the ASRock b650m-hdv m.2 which is a weird name for a motherboard but whatever um so yeah this tends to be around 130 US Dollars and it basically does everything you need and that nothing extra and when I say need I mean desperately need like you only get your six USB type A ports you do get bios flashback which is now a standard feature of am5 every single motherboard has this bios flashback is present on all boards um you do get one USB type-c port and a basic set of audio ports in terms of power delivery this will power even a 7950x just fine in fact it'll even overclock a 7950x because ryzen CPUs are thermally limited not power limited that's very different from the Intel sidewear uh well you're still very thermally limited but if you build a like big enough cooling system you can get 13 gen CPUs to pull just absurd amounts of power which is not true for seven like first ryzen 7000 series CPUs uh the board does have some basic uh troubleshooting LEDs so it'll light up as it's posting unfortunately these are all the same color but they do at least light up in like a more interesting sequence than just one at a time so you can kind of better tell what part of the post process it's in but uh yeah it's um I wish they were color coded that would be better you do get two M two slots on the board you get a Gen 4 x 16 and then a gen 4x4 off of the CPU you also get four SATA ports really if you're just doing a basic gaming build around a 7800x 3D this is in my opinion the go-to motherboard right like if you are by yeah basically if you're building a ryzen 7000 system and you don't have any like special requirements like I need a ton of m.2 slots or I need a ton of USB ports or I need it like I need a postcode I really want an external clock gen because I really care about five percent more CPU performance or uh you get like there you know you you can have requirements you might want Thunderbolt ports 10 gig Lan uh this board kind of does board things you know the basic functionality of a motherboard that you need in order to have a functional computer this will do it it'll even overclock just not a 7800x 3D because it doesn't have the external clock gen but it'll overclock all the other CPUs because for those who don't need an external clock gen um oh admittedly your tuning options are a lot more limited without the external clock gen so anyway um yeah just a really solid like basic motherboard option as far as I'm concerned and this is the motherboard that is like well you know if you're going to be buying something more expensive than this you should have a specific reason for why you want something more expensive than this so let's take a look at something more expensive and see some of the reasons that you might consider it so this is a gigabyte v650m uh aorus Elite ax um obviously it has a more powerful vrm that doesn't really actually make much of a difference because the ryzen 7000 chips are not really limited by power delivery at all in fact this motherboard could probably run a 7950x in Prime 95 small ffts with a static overclock with the vrm heatsink removed because I've done that with a 14 phase motherboard and it was just fine and this is a this isn't actually a 14 phase this is like 12 power stages running in a six phase configuration but in terms of current handling capacity the phase count itself doesn't actually make that much of a difference it's just about how many low side mosfets you have in parallel because that's where the bulk of the current is flowing through most of the time um anyway and when I say bulk of the current I mean like 90 of it um anyway so yeah you get a kind of not relevant vrm upgrade you get some better cooling for the m.2 is you do still only get two m.2 slots the x16 Gen 4 is still the same well yeah it's x16 uh Gen 4 and then a gen 4x4 at the bottom uh one of the m.2 slots is Gen 5 but that was already true on this board as well yep Gen 5 on the one of the m.2 slots um so the reason you would actually consider this oh you also get like basic troubleshooting LEDs no they're not color coded you get four SATA ports same as the hdv so you might be like okay why would I get this instead of the hdb it's the rear i o you get Wi-Fi built in uh you get a lot more USB type A ports you get still get two and a half gig Lan and you also get an optical output instead of no Optical so depending on what kind of external audio solution you have this might actually be a just a requirement that you desperately need um and yeah the ASRock board just doesn't do that this tends to go for 100 and uh tends to go for around 190 dollars so you get some you know extra functionality uh but CPU performance wise this and this are going to be the same anyway um up next we have the b650e riptide so now we've gone full size and we get a lot more connectors for doing that well uh not necessarily wait oh this one doesn't have the rear i o photo I would I preferred the old ASRock website it's a you know this this layout much more consistent in terms of what was available in terms of pictures but yeah so you don't get uh quite as many USB type A ports as you get on the b650m aorus elitex uh in the rear i o you also don't have the optical output anymore but you get a better pcie configuration just because there's more space between the pcis also you still get a uh well you get the Gen 5m.2 this is also the cheapest motherboard to offer a gen 5x16 slot I don't know why you would actually care about that because currently the only thing that you can well it's not I guess you might be insane and put like five gen 5f.2 ssds into your main pcie slot but for most people that pcie slot is for their GPU and an RTX 4090 as pcie 4.0 so Gen 5 doesn't do anything for you there anyway but this being an ATX board it does have more space for m.2 slots and so it gets three of them in total instead of just two which we saw in the matx boards you still only get four SATA ports there's also still troubleshooting LEDs um and uh the thing with the m.2 slots on this board is that they're a bit weird in terms of speeds so you get one that's Gen 5 which is standard for most am5 motherboards you get one that's uh gen three by two which is the weird one and you get a gen 4x4 um so yeah that's it's like not you know like one of these is like really meant for like bulk storage then things that you actually want to load really quickly um but hey you do have the option of more m.2 drives and you also have the the force data ports so you can kind of pack a lot of store a lot more storage onto this board well not really a lot more but you can pack more storage onto this board than onto the matx boards also that pcie uh like the pcie X-Force law is 3.0 uh X4 and what I really like about it though is that it's at all the way at the bottom of the the motherboard so if you're putting like a capture card or something into it it won't get into the airflow of your GPU um which can significantly increase the amount of noise a GPU produces is like putting a an add-in card directly in front of a GPU it won't necessarily affect The Thermals that much but it can produce a lot more noise as like the air having to go around the Restriction causes a bunch of extra turbulence and that can get loud depending on uh the design of the GPU that you're putting a capture card like putting an add-in card in front of right and that could be like 10 gig line or something um so yeah also this does have Wi-Fi built in so a interesting motherboard if you need sort of more internal connectors um compared to say the you know aors elitex and this goes for around 220 dollars uh also at around 220 we have the ASRock b650 live mixer and this has a really cool set of connectivity features for for this price point this is awesome like look at this rear i o it's totally packed with USB ports I'm a big fan of that you also have the optical audio output so yeah um like you're not even losing that compared to the elitex uh unlike the with the riptide now this doesn't have a Gen 5 uh x16 slot which I don't really think is much of a loss you do still have a gen 5m.2 your 2m.2 uh your other 2m.2 slots on this board are gen 4x4 um yeah you can see here you've got two gen four by four slots and one gen five by four slot on this board so three in total still but they are now faster than on the uh rip well all of them are now at least as faster faster than what you had on the riptide um now the one downside to this is that the very bottom pcie thought in this motherboard actually shares bandwidth with one of the m.2 slots and when I say shares I mean you can have one or the other they can't be both plugged in because pcie Lanes don't magically multiply themselves unfortunately if they could that'd be really cool but they don't um also you do still have a CPU attached pcie slot uh that X4 but now it's in the middle so if you do run into that potential issue of like well if I put a 10 gig Lan card in there or a capture card or whatever it might screw up the airflow into the GPU and your GPU might get kind of loud but that's like it depends really depends and yeah in terms of connectivity options this is a really interesting Loadout of like m.2 and pcie connectivity the sacrifice here is the SATA ports uh there's two of them um not really a big deal if you're doing a new build but if you're migrating from an older system and you have like a bunch of SATA drives that you've just been carrying forward from like past builds this is a potential issue the reason I pointed out is that's actually relevant to me because I did buy one of these mostly for the color color scheme and yeah the two SATA ports are like my biggest gripe with this motherboard is just like man I would totally daily this if it just had one more SATA port I guess I could use an add-in card for that if I really wanted to or just like you know migrate all of my data onto a bigger drive or something or onto an m.2 driver or whatever anyway so yeah this has a really interesting just rear i o configuration and then some really cool internal connectivity as long as you don't need a ton of SATA ports because they're basically is just two it does have troubleshooting LEDs and in terms of the vrm this is actually the same vrm as the riptide it'll overclock a 7950x just fine memory overclocking works just fine uh the only real complaint is this is an ASRock board so you might find that there are certain settings in the Bios that the board though don't do anything because they're like features that they got forgot to remove and the main one that I'm I'm thinking of with this is the bclk settings uh even the hdv has bclk settings that look like there's an external clock gen on the board but there isn't they don't do anything um so yeah and that's that's also a problem with the live mixer is that there is a extra bclk option that does nothing because there isn't an external lock gen anyway uh let's move on to a more expensive board the Asus Pro art b650 Creator now this is at around 260 dollars instead of around 220 and the reason it's in the list is very simple it has dual X8 pcie slots off of the CPU this is the cheapest motherboard that does dual X8 so this is perfect if you're doing like a 3D rendering workstation or something and you want to run like uh dual Quadro gpus you can't really run dual 4090s on this unless you water cool them or you find some 40 90 with a like three slot or two slot heatsink because yeah this this doesn't have four slot spacing between the pcie slots so that's uh like basically the biggest flaw if you're trying to build a rendering like GPU rendering system around this board is just your gpus won't necessarily fit um but uh yeah it has dual X8 and that is a very uncommon feature on am5 just sort of in general so it's really cool that there's like a motherboard at the 260 dollar uh price point that offers this functionality because it is quite rare uh you do also got 3m.2 slots on this board you also get four SATA ports you get some basic troubleshooting LEDs they are color coded at the very least but this being a workstation ish board I really think it should have had a postcode because that used to be a standard feature of like workstation boards from Asus was that they have a postcode because if your workstation doesn't want to turn on that's kind of a problem and it would be nice to be able to tell why it doesn't want to turn on faster right than just having to rely on some color-coded LEDs and there is one sort of major downside to this board uh compared to like other boards in this price range which is the rear i o there are like no USB type A ports by which I mean there's five of them which in my opinion is very much nowhere near enough this is just like not acceptable this is not enough USB type A you do however get a full set of audio ports you do get two and a half gig and one gig Lan these are both real Tech so you get like dual Lan functionality I'm not sure what you'd really do with it but there are some people that want that uh you also get bios flashback as standard for am5 um and I did want to check the actual like gens of the m.2 slots oh and you get a X6 uh 4.0 by force law off of the chipset at the very bottom uh of the motherboard and a 4.0 by one uh also off of the chipset the bottom pcie slot shares bandwidth with one of the m.2 slots so again if you you can either have 3m.2 drives or you can have three pcie like X4 devices or well like three uh three pcie cards you can't have three of everything at the same time there's simply not enough bandwidth in the b650 chipset to do that funnily enough there's not really enough bandwidth in the x670 chipset either but the thing is because the x670 chipset just Daisy chains the chipsets off of each other so like you're not actually getting more bandwidth but you do get more flexibility in terms of how many connectors there are anyway in terms of the m.2 slots you've got two connected directly to the CPU these are 5.0 and 4.0 X4 and then you get one off of the chipset which is 4.0 X4 so yeah a uh pretty interesting board as long as you don't need like if you want dual X8 and you don't care about rear i o or like don't care about usb type A ports because there aren't very many of them here um but yeah definitely an interesting option if you're trying to build like a GPU rendering setup or a machine learning setup and you need like multi-gpu support this is one of the cheapest Port actually literally the cheapest board with dual X8 so that's how that's got into the list next up we have our cheapest x670e motherboard the Phantom gaming lightning uh this just packs a whole bunch of connectivity because that's kind of the idea of the x670 chipset it's the b650 chipset with another b650 chipset glued to it so you get more ports okay I'm pretty sure if you tried to use them all at the same time you would actually hit a bandwidth bottleneck at the like chipset to CPU connection um but as long as you don't try to use all of them you do get more ports like at the same time other than like they can all be populated at the same time but like if you try to like write and read and write from all of them at the same time that would potentially cause an issue um anyway so the rear i o on this is very strong except there's no audio like Optical output which uh yeah kind of annoying because this board is also around 260 dollars we are doing the motherboards in like from cheapest to most expensive so um yeah this is also around 206 dollars you do get a ton of USB type A though which I'm a big fan of you got two and a half gig Lan um and then internally you get four m.2 slots but they're like as rock m.2 slots so their bandwidths are just all over the place right so you get a gen 5x4 which is standard you get a gen three by four off of the chipset you get a gen 4x2 off of the chipset and a gen 4x4 off of the chipset so you have like three no you have literally four different speed m.2 slots on this board or like two four different configurations of m.2 slot on this board at the same time um they're not actually four different speeds because like you have one that's very very fast and then you have two that are technically the same speed but they achieve that speed in very different uh connector configurations and then you have one that's like in between the the two slow ones and the the one fast one which is the uh gen 4x4 you also get four SATA ports and the nice thing is that it looks like yeah none of these are actually sharing uh bandwidth with each other like they do on say b650 board so you can have all of the m.2s and all of the pcie slots at the same time uh you get a you know pcie 5.0 x uh 5.0 x 16 off of the CPU and a 4.0 by 4 off of the CPU which is the bottom pcie slot I think why um okay no that's the middle one um yeah because you have that one X over here that One X isn't really useful because your GPU will cover it up so good luck actually getting anything in there but you do get the the 4.0 by 4 on this x16 slot over here so again you run into that like uh the whatever you put in there is directly in in front of your GPU which might not be ideal and then you get that bottom one off of the chipset as well um which uh yeah so you get a lot of like uh interesting connectivity options with this board both with the rear i o and then internally with like the 4m.2 slots four SATA ports a bunch of pcie lanes which you know is possible thanks to the x670e chipset being two b650 chipsets glued together um vrm is actually I would be surprised if this wasn't basically the same vrm that ASRock has on there uh cheaper boards um not that that vrm is bad like it's a perfectly like it's perfectly capable of powering any any ryzen 7000 series CPU so that's not really a concern um but yeah this is mainly just a connectivity upgrade over the uh cheaper boards on the b650e chipset anyway up next we have the cheapest motherboard to offer a postcode there's actually kind of two of these but one of them is having like weird availability issues there's the Asus Rog strix b650e E gaming Wi-Fi this thing is 350 US Dollars and that is the least amount of money you can spend to get a postcode which I think is completely insane but here we are um anyway so the reason this board is in the list is because it does have a postcode um and then you might be looking at these pcie slots and going like oh it does dual X8 right wrong this does X8 X4 because reasons and that reason is that Asus has far more expensive motherboards with postcodes and dual X8 and they would prefer it if you bought one of those rather than this um but anyway the pcie configuration on this motherboard is actually my least favorite part of it um because otherwise it would have been really interesting because here's what Asus decided to do with the pcie lanes uh you get the you get x16 right on the primary slot and then you got and then if you use the secondary slaw you get x8x4 and the reason you get x8x4 is because four of the pcie lanes from this x16 slot actually go into an m.2 slot yeah so if you use all of the m.2 slots on this board admittedly it does have a lot of them there's four m.2 slots on this motherboard in total but yeah if you use all four of them your GPU drops down to X8 not a big deal a 4090 on X8 uh 4.0 is basically the same speed as it is at x16 4.0 but yeah um this this is just like I don't like the like the inflexibility of m.2 slots you can very easily convert a pcie slot into more m.2 slots going the other way especially going from like 2m.2x4s back to an X8 it's not really an option so yeah I I don't I don't like this um and Asus is aware that people want dual X8 functionality but you know you can't have dual like Sate and a postcode at a reasonable price that's just not allowed and to be fair to Asus most other motherboard vendors actually some other board vendors don't bother to offer dual X8 functionality at all like gigabyte they just do not have a motherboard that offers dual X8 whatsoever which I find incredibly annoying um but um anyway so yeah uh you get a lot of m.2 slots but the consequence is wackiness with your pcie lanes there is a 4.0 by 4 off of the chipset which uh does not seem to share bandwidth with anything so I'm not sure why they have a double asterisk connects to that but anyway uh the other nice thing about this board is the rear I OVO um so this board is sort of like this has a lot of connectivity um it just has and the cool thing about like there is one upside to the way Asus has configured their pcie Lanes here is that you can technically plug in everything on this motherboard and nothing gets disabled right like on a on say the the live mixer board like one of these m.2 slots is literally like you either have the X4 uh pcie slot at the bottom or you have one of them.2 slots you can't have both at the same time with this you can have all of the m.2s all of the pcie slots all of the SATA ports and I think all like all of the rear i o plugged in at the same time and nothing will get disabled I'm pretty sure you're going to hit some kind of battle bandwidth bottleneck if you actually try to use everything at the same time in that scenario but nothing will be disconnected so that's the upside to doing this I'm still not a fan of it personally I would have preferred three m.2 slots and dual X8 support instead of 4m.2 slots and x8x4 um but uh yeah depending on your use case this might really not affect you whatsoever and this board does have a postcode which is pretty cool but as far as I know it does not have an external clock gen uh which is quite unfortunate because in this price range you can get motherboards with external clock gens like say the b650e aorus master unfortunately this motherboard does equally silly things with his pcie lanes because gigabyte decided that it would be really funny if you could have four Gen 5 m.2 ssds at the same time apparently that's a thing that people want they must do a lot of file copying like a lot of file copying um so yeah if you're a file copying Enthusiast here's a motherboard that has five I mean four Gen 5 m.2 slots at around the 350 US dollar price point at least that's its MSRP in practice this motherboard seems to show up more at around the 400 US dollar price point and it does have availability issues which might be related to the fact that the vrm on some of these like has a bug where it just shuts down on AVX workloads um and I know that because I have one like gigabyte actually ended up sending me two b658 e aors Masters because they sent me one and that one just shuts down if you try to run cinebench R20 on it and then they sent another one and that one works great like this is actually a really good board if you get a working one um and yeah I'm not sure what's going on with that um because I have seen like some people buy like b650 like I yeah I've heard from some people that they bought a b650e master at retail and it had the bugged out vrm and I've also heard from people who have a b650e master that they bought retail and they have no issues with it whatsoever so yeah I'm not sure uh what's going on with that other than that this board also has a postcode so if it was 350 US Dollars it would be you know direct competition for cheapest postcode with the Asus strix board but with the availability being what it is that's kind of yeah um and it also has an external clock gen and as far as I know uh well this would be the cheapest motherboard with an external clock gen if gigabyte actually did a good job of keeping this board in stock at the MSRP which as far as I can tell they aren't and uh yeah so I I hope gigabyte can figure out what is going on with this board um because if it was actually available at its MSRP like reliably and it you know they fix the vrm issue which what's really weird about this is this is the same vrm as the x670e master like literally the same Parts exactly the same Parts I don't get it but um yeah so like it shouldn't even be a difficult fix as far as I can tell because the x670e board doesn't have issues and it's the same vrm like exactly the same uh actually I think that inductors might be different but that shouldn't affect the vrm like turning off an AVX workloads mind you it isn't dangerous to the CPU I did check it with the oscilloscope it just turns off it doesn't do anything unexpected it's not tripping some kind of like over voltage protection type deal it actually looks like it's tripping over current protection for reasons I can't explain um which is fine like that's not going to hurt the CPU it's just it's kind of it's the equivalent of if you turned off your power supply while the system is running um anyway um yeah so and then the rear i o on this board is also really solid at least if you're a big fan of USB type A ports which I am uh but uh yeah this this board is kind of like it's expensive really the main reason to get it is the 4 gen 5m not 2 slots but it does have ecl K support it does have a postcode if you can find a working one it's a really good board I don't know how hard that is to do because yeah I'm not going to go to a store and like test a hundred and also maybe some stores get like a good batch right and so some some retailers might only have working ones and some might not so I I really don't know what's going on with this but uh this board is good like this is a good board if you get one that works it's just also really expensive and I personally think having four Gen 5 m.2 slots is really silly I'd much rather have dual X8 support especially since the hardware required for dual X8 support is the same as the hardware required for doing what gigabyte did with the m.2 slots here so yeah anyway up next we have the ASRock b650e Tai Chi and this board is like in so a lot of the past ASRock boards that we went through right you have some really interesting internal connectivity options like lots of pcie lanes lots of m.2 slots especially on say like a live mixer and then you get to the b650e Tai Chi and you might be looking at this going like oh this has dual like sight support uh no no it doesn't this is x16 Gen 5 and 4.0 by 4 off of the chipset um yeah but you do get a postcode and you do have an external clock gen on this board which is how it got into the list the rear i o also packs a lot of USB type A ports and a thunderbolt port and an optical out and like yeah like a really nicely featured rear i o combined with like a postcode external clock gen and then you look at the pcie lane configuration and this is literally worse than a b650e live mixer um which uh yeah also this is 370-ish US dollars so this is not a cheap board um but yeah so this is an interesting one like it makes sense if your number one priority is just like a single GPU setup you also only get like 3m.2 slots on board right you get one gen 5x4 and then two gen four by fours um so yeah internal connectivity on this board is like weirdly limited relative to the price it's at right like both the the gigabyte and the the like the strikes and the gigabyte board both have four m.2 slots both of them achieving them in wacky ways but they are technically there um there's also this if you want 4m.2 slots without any wacky PCI things going on and then there's this which I mean this which comes in at 370 dollars so it's significantly more expensive than all of the other boards has less m.2 slots and doesn't even have like two pcie slots connected directly to the CPU um so like an interesting test bench board Maybe not and well depends on your needs for your daily system right A lot of people will just have a GPU and that's it and if you're one of those people that just has a GPU and some drives this is great if you're not one of those people this is potentially an issue because running certain add-in cards through the chipset can have problems um right so yeah that's like it still gets into the list because you do like this is the cheapest board within like one of the cheapest boards to have a you know postcode an external actually yeah the only other motherboard with a postcode and an external clock gen is the aorus master so and like the master has some issues surrounding it uh this doesn't so that's a thing um so if you really want to push your 7800x 3D by you know five-ish percent maybe a bit more than that this is probably your best bet I think it's kind of ridiculous to be spending like close to three times what the b650mhdv costs for a five percent external clock gen overclock but um I mean you do get some other upgrades right like extra USB ports that kind of thing um but yeah this this is a board that like basically didn't didn't wasn't really going to be in the list but then I was like well maybe somebody really really wants an external clock Jen and they don't want to master for reasons which I can understand those reasons um and in that case yeah this is an option it's not you know in terms of connectivity internally I'm not a big fan of it but um if you just want to clock gen in a postcode this is definitely a solid option also it does have a thunderbolt Port um so yeah if you want that then it's an option for that functionality as well anyway let's go up in price so now we're at 440 US dollars with the mpg x670 carbon Wi-Fi and this motherboard has my favorite connector configuration and one tiny little problem it doesn't have an external clock gen it's 440 dollars and it doesn't have an external clock gin this is ridiculous um but it does have a really cool connectivity configuration so you get two gen 5m.2 slots gen 5x4 m.2 slots built into the board these are both connected directly to the CPU and you still get dual X8 pcie support because there is enough pcie length to do that it's just like for some reason most motherboard manufacturers just refuse to do that for reasons I don't understand um so yeah you get dual Gen 4 gen 5x4 m.2s on the board you get dual X8 Gen 5 Support also on the pcie slots there's a X4 by uh I mean gen 4x4 off of the chipset uh there's also two gen 4x4 uh m.2 slots off of the chipset so you get four m.2 slots built into the board you also get six SATA ports there might be some like bandwidth sharing going on with the SATA ports and the m.2 slots you'll have to check the manual for that and get a very solid rear i o right lots of USB type a Wi-Fi 6E clear CMOS uh bios flashback smart button which can be rebound like MSI says this can do safe boot I really doubt that like gigabyte says they have a safe boot Button doesn't in my experience it doesn't work Asus has some other boards that should have a working safe boot Button in my experience it doesn't work so I have serious doubts that the safe boot functionality on this actually works but maybe MSI figured it out because yeah it really is like a as far as I know the issue with getting safe boot to work on AMD motherboards is that AMD has like their own safe boot push seizure that isn't very reliable and if you want to implement your own safe mode procedure it somehow has to override the AMD one and that's apparently a problem which is why it just like never works um but anyway if if this does work that's really cool um but uh yeah so really solid rear i o options on this board has a postcode and then the one complaint is just like it doesn't have an external clock gen if this had an external clock gen this would basically be the it does everything motherboard right because it kind of does right we've got like the up like the best piece like yeah optimal pcie Lane configuration all of the m.2s six SATA ports postcode solid rear i o like and then it's just like and it doesn't have an external clock gen so yeah that's it's kind of a like a bummer but if you're not buying a 7800 X 3D or even if you are buying a 1700x3d the external clock gen like it's not that big a deal like I said it doesn't make that much of a difference to the performance it's like five to ten percent depending on how far you actually manage to push the CPU how lucky you get with the CPU and what workload you're running because certain workloads will basically not benefit whatsoever from the external clock gen um but uh yeah like I think a 400 if if this board was like ten dollars more and it had the external clock gen I would like it a lot more because it would just take all of the boxes instead of like 95 of the boxes right like it does right now anyway um let's move on to a motherboard that takes far fewer boxes but adds some weird ones the pro art x670e Creator Wi-Fi and when I say weird ones I consider it Thunderbolt ports weird okay let's just I consider them like an exotic connectivity option that I've never used I don't plan to ever use but people like it so you know I do include it in these Roundup lists um anyway so yeah the x67 to e Creator Wi-Fi has 10 gig line and two and a half gig Lan solid set like decent number of USB type A ports it does have uh two Thunderbolt ports using the Intel controller like for some reason a AMD mother like well my motherboard manufacturers just don't like referring to their Intel Thunderbolt controllers on AMD motherboards as being Thunderbolt I don't know why if you actually go into the driver page for a lot of these motherboards like it's labeled as Thunderbolt drivers so it's Thunderbolt right but uh yeah this does have a DisplayPort input so you actually get display pass through on this board which is a pretty neat feature that some people want you don't get an optical out for some reason so if you're doing an audio workstation this might be kind of a problem depending on what kind of EXT You Know audio setup you you have um but yeah that's a really weird thing to be missing on a 440 US dollar motherboard there's also no postcode again because workstations don't have boot up issues according to Asus the workstations never fail to post you don't need a postcode um again the reason I'm ripping on the postcode is like this is a 440 us motherboard but also postcodes were a standard feature of Asus workstation boards for years and now they're just gone I guess because Asus thinks that if you're building a workstation and you want a postcode you should go buy an Rog board instead that's probably the reasoning for Macys and admittedly the Rog boards are more expensive so yeah I can see the profit motive there clearly um anyway this does also have dual X8 pcie support um don't yeah dual X8 you also get one pcie slot off of the chipset again the pcie slot spacing on this won't take uh dual 4090s unless you like water cool them or something because 40 90s are just absolutely massive but if you're running like dual quadros or something it's fine the same is true for actually every other uh motherboard that we've gone through like so far none of the Dual X8 boards actually I don't think there's a single dual X8 board in in this list that actually has spacing for 40 90s because there's like one board that does that and I think that's like a really weird requirement so I didn't bother to include it um actually no there's like two boards that do that so if you're looking for for those you won't have a hard time finding them um you won't be thrilled about the price point when you do find them but you're buying 240 90s so like I guess spending insane amounts of money is probably just kind of the way it goes when you're building a dual 4090 rendering setup you could also just use risers or something to save a bunch of money anyway uh yeah you do get 4m.2 slots 5.0 5.0 well two 5.0 X4 off of the CPU and then two 4.0 X4 off of the chipsets um you'd only get four SATA ports instead of six that you get on some other x670e boards but uh yeah all around a very like if you need the connectivity options this board offers it's a really solid option for that though I will point out that the 10 gig Lan being built into the board at 440 is not actually that useful because you can get 10 gig Lan add-in cards for like fifty dollars and then you can buy so you could buy your 50 add-in card and stick it into say like a live mixer or a rip actually I'm not sure if it would work on the rip side you could definitely stick it into a live mixer uh you could definitely stick it into well yeah you could stick it into one of these if you're willing to give up your actually that bottom chipset slot Gen 4 yeah this is Gen 4x4 so you could put that 10 gig line card into the Gen 4x4 um at the at the bottom of the board you might even be able to do it on the Rip Tide as well as potentially that actually yeah you could actually totally put a gen 4x4 because the this PCI slot is Gen 4x4 same is true for the hdv so if you really want 10 gig Lan uh you can just buy a 10 gig line card for like 50 bucks and stick it into like a 200 motherboard and you're still going to be you know significantly below the price of the pro art in fact you can get dual 10 gig Lan cards for like a hundred and fifty dollars and if you stick that into a 200 motherboard it's still cheaper than a pro art and now you have two 10 gigaports instead of just one so the 10 gig on this motherboard isn't really a I would not consider it like the a good selling point for the board this is really more a case of like you want Thunderbolt and the 10 gig Lan and the Dual X8 like you want you want the actual full combination of features that this motherboard offers rather than any one individual feature um I think probably the biggest highlight is the actual display port pass through because that is very very rare in fact this might be the only board that does this um the the DisplayPort pass through because there are other Thunderbolt boards but they don't do DisplayPort pass through speaking of which the 500 x670e Tai Chi this also has two Thunderbolt ports uh more USB type A but it doesn't have a display pass-through port yeah there's there's no display port input anywhere on the motherboard so you can't actually do display pass-through on the two Thunderbolt ports that it has uh which is rather unfortunate also this board is 500 it does do dual X8 on the pcie slot which is Knight on the pcie slots which is nice uh it has four m.2s is it four yeah it has four m.2 drives built in uh however you only get one gen 5x4 uh the others are gen 4x4 you've got eight SATA ports which is very rare on M5 uh but at the same time I'm not sure why you would want eight SATA ports on an am5 motherboard unless you're building like a storage server but like really yeah like in that scenario I feel like you could just buy one of the cheaper boards with like P and use like a pcies to say to add-in card and probably get significantly more SATA ports that way than than by buying an x670 etai Chi so really the reason this gets into the list is because you know uh dual X8 postcode clock gen um really it kind of covers a lot of the same points that the x670e carbon does from MSI except it is 60 more expensive and you don't get two gen 5m.2 slots which the carbon does have the rear i o is arguably a bit weaker um but at the same time it does have a external clock gen so yeah it's sort of like the IT addresses one of the issues of the carbon while making some trades that you might find uh acceptable or unacceptable depending on what exactly you're looking for in your motherboard oh yeah you get a cut down set of audio ports compared to the carbon as well um so yeah this this isn't I wouldn't really consider the Tai Chi an upgrade as much of a side grade which is why the like 500 price tag is like really not great in my opinion I really wonder why ASRock didn't opt for like a smaller vrm that's cheaper because putting 24 105 amp smart power stages on an am5 motherboard is utterly pointless um like it really is just completely pointless there is no reason to do this and they did it twice the b650e Tai Chi has the exact same vrm if they literally cut half the vrm off and made the board like twenty dollars cheaper I would find it a lot more interesting same goes here except this one I wish was even more cheaper than just like a 20 price cut which depending on how much they're paying for the power stage it could it could be more than twenty dollar price cut um but yeah anyway so the x670 Tai Chi has some interesting connectivity options at a not that interesting price tag and then we get to the 700 Meg x670e Ace this is basically a do everything motherboard there's just one thing it doesn't do because of course there is it doesn't do Thunderbolts um but it does everything else um so in the rear i o you get a bunch of USB type a bunch of USB type-c ports full set of audio ports Wi-Fi 6E 10 Giga quantity Alan the same set of buttons that you find on the carbon you get a postcode like internally you've got a postcode you get x16 0x4 support off of the CPU X8 x8x4 off of the CPU so all of the pcie slots on this board are actually wired to the CPU which is really cool um and you get four m.2 slots on the board itself so the board also comes with an m.2 add-in card uh so you can technically pack like out of the box this board will allow you to pack like six m.2 ssds onto it by using the add-in card which I think is kind of cheating because you can buy any motherboard with dual X8 and then use an add-in card to get your two extrasated I mean two extra m.2 ssds on there but this board does that like the board already comes with it so you don't have to buy that separately not really a big value add but like it's kind of neat that it does include that especially at the 700 price point when you kind of expect to get a bunch of extras with your board um other than that it does have dual bios it's one of the very few motherboards to have dual wires which is pretty neat it also has voltage read points it also has an external clock gen uh this is basically a do everything board right IT addresses the like one shortcoming of the carbon without actually making any other sacrifices is just a straight upgrade from the carbon uh in terms of functionality and then it adds also like dual bios and stuff so um yeah but this is seven hundred dollars and as long as you don't want all of the functionality of this board at the same time you can get basically most of the functionality for a significantly lower price with some of the other motherboards that we've gone over um so yeah so like you have your 10 gig Lan but I really think this is the best part of this board is the the CPU like all of the pcie lanes are just directly from the CPU so depending on what you're doing this that can be very very helpful um and um yeah that's that's it for the uh noteworthy motherboard lists there's a lot of other motherboards that obviously didn't make it into the list um not because they're bad just because they're not you know like some people will buy a motherboard because it looks cool I don't really think that's a sensible way to shop from other boards but hey if you want to buy a motherboard because you think it looks good actually no I've done that I've literally done that I bought one of these um but uh yeah if you're buying a motherboard on Aesthetics on like Aesthetics reasoning or you know you you really like Asus bios and you hate everybody else's bile so you just have to have an Asus motherboard or uh you really like MSI bios which is like my case which isn't really like for me it's not really I must have an MSI board it's just like yeah of generally speaking msi's bios is the least Messy as far as I'm concerned and it's the easiest to navigate um you know if you have like specific brand preferences or something like that there there are obviously other options that I didn't cover here because you can kind of get most well no there's one exception gigabyte literally doesn't have a single dual X8 pcie motherboard at all for am5 which I am so annoyed about because that is one of the features I care about a lot mostly because I do like multi-gpu benching um so yeah you know I kind of want dual like sights slots like they don't even need to support SLI I'm perfectly happy to run like dual 290 R9 290s or something but like yeah gigabyte doesn't have a motherboard that does that which kind of annoys me um but um yeah for most other functionality you can generally find options from every brand they're just not necessarily going to be at the lowest price point um so like everybody has a 10g land motherboard uh everybody has actually I'm not sure that everybody has a thunderbolt board but uh yeah so really the the deciding thing with am5 motherboards like is what kind of connectivity do you need um or if you don't care about like again there are people who just buy motherboards based on Aesthetics in which case you know like yeah just that's a perfectly valid way of buying a board but I don't know why you need any research then because you know you're just buying a board because it looks cool um so that's like anti-research as far as I'm concerned um but yeah so there's a lot of boards that didn't make it into the list because they just don't offer a particularly interesting set of features at a low enough price point even if they have like a you know like feature parity with the say the Tai Chi or something if the board is like a hundred dollars or two hundred dollars more expensive and has the same functionality I would just buy the cheaper one I see no reason to pay pay extra to get the same functionality because the more expensive am5 boards they are not faster really the only thing that makes a significant performance difference with am5 motherboards in terms of like CPU performance is the external clock gen and well you can get that on on this and you can get that on this and admittedly these are both very expensive at around you know 350 to 400 and also that external clock gen is only going to translate to like a maybe five to ten percent performance Advantage compared to a motherboard that's literally 130. but you know like that like if if you care about performance that's basically the limit of your your criteria in my opinion it's just like I need an external clock gin and then it's like okay um but otherwise it's just what connectors do you want and then buy the cheapest one because in terms of powering a ryzen 7000 series CPU it's not like Intel they don't pull that much power you don't need that much power delivery um and in terms of and then if you especially the 7800x3d just doesn't need any power delivery like you can very easily run a 70 100x3d unlike a four-phase motherboard which isn't even really a thing for am5 right so that's kind of the thing is like if you're building a system around a 7800 X 3D things like power delivery are just utterly irrelevant to the cpu's performance because it doesn't pull any power um so yeah anyway hopefully you found this video uh helpful and uh yeah um so I guess that so that that's the end of the video so like share subscribe leave any comments questions suggestions down in the comment section below if you'd like to support what I do here with actually hardcore overclocking I do have a patreon there's a link to that down in the description below there's also the hlc Teespring store where you can pick up shirts hoodies posters you know the usual uh YouTuber merch and I've also got a band camp um which uh you might want to check out there's links to all of that down in the description below and uh yeah it'd be much appreciated if you do support the channel so that's it for the video thank you for watching and uh goodbye

Channel: Actually Hardcore Overclocking

Views: 150,387

Keywords: Overclocking, PCbuilding, Buildzoid, AHOC, Actually, Hardcore, Hardware, OC

Id: lTBnzUF6EbE

Length: 52min 21sec (3141 seconds)

Published: Sat May 13 2023