Begun the AM5 Wars Have....

[NightReaver]

Didn't B550 not come out until after X570? Same "tactic"... from a business perspective.. why release the "budget" option along with the premium product... early adopter price premium/gouging is not new..

Yup. It's happening with the GPUs/cpus too. Early adopter fee strikes again. Yet people will still buy them up and then complain.

 

[DanNeely]

Yeah, all that high end PCI-E 5.0 Goodness... But the adoption price for the one with all the lanes is brutal at 800 bucks. You can get the 500 buck one and get the bare bones version of it tho! Lol! I believe I am only using 20 of my lanes now. The 6900XT and my PCI-E 4.0 M.2, I suspect I will be fine waiting until this stuff starts becoming mainstream and the prices normalize.

Agreed. I'm 95% going to settle for one x16 5.0 and 1 m.2 5.0. Probably won't need either at launch (no 5.0 GPUs not sure if any 5.0 SSDs will be out yet) but I'm hoping to keep the core of the system for a half dozenish years, so my upgrade GPU if nothing else will be a 5.0 card.

I've zero need for a second GPU, and nothing else on the consumer market needs a x16 slot. I'm also unlikely to add a second expansion card needing 5.0 speeds for anything else either. I'll probably have a 10gb NIC in; but those come with slower PCIe flavors for wider compatibility. And even if I do end up adding a second SSD the real world benefit from 4.0 vs 5.0 is likely to be negligible so putting overflow storage on a slower port won't matter.

 

[sfsuphysics]

I'm not getting hung up on anything. I am skipping this generation. Maybe two or three. The pricing is kinda brutal and they should have their full product stack at launch. However, since they likely know most people will buy the B650 instead... It's likely a tactic at launch this time instead of a legit issue with getting the chips manufactured like the B550 delay. I suspect they are gonna gouge as many people as possible this time around, before introducing the affordable models.

AMD is a greedy corporation, after all. We like to think of them as the underdog of the hardware world but that has been fast changing. They're starting to resemble Intel now, and Intel... well, the jury is still out on which direction they are headed.

oh absolutely, this is why they showcase their flagship products first, and the cheaper alternatives for the masses will tend to get little to no fanfare. I just hope they don't pull a Nvidia with the 30 series and over produce 3090s because "there's limited silicon, we can get more money from them with higher end cards, and they've shown they're willing to pay stupid expensive prices".

I on the other hand may hop on this bandwagon since I'm still rocking Haswell with DDR3 ram and really wanted to upgrade when the 30 series was out but held off for obvious reasons. That said, I'm not committed and getting in on some cheaper AM4/DDR4 action may be tempting since I'm sure it's "good enough" and except for really early on in my computer history (original DDR sdram) never upgraded a CPU and reused the same ram anyways, of course never have been an early adopter either which may say more about why.... but 4690K FFS, I obviously don't upgrade my CPU very often.

 

[Legendary Gamer]

oh absolutely, this is why they showcase their flagship products first, and the cheaper alternatives for the masses will tend to get little to no fanfare. I just hope they don't pull a Nvidia with the 30 series and over produce 3090s because "there's limited silicon, we can get more money from them with higher end cards, and they've shown they're willing to pay stupid expensive prices".

I on the other hand may hop on this bandwagon since I'm still rocking Haswell with DDR3 ram and really wanted to upgrade when the 30 series was out but held off for obvious reasons. That said, I'm not committed and getting in on some cheaper AM4/DDR4 action may be tempting since I'm sure it's "good enough" and except for really early on in my computer history (original DDR sdram) never upgraded a CPU and reused the same ram anyways, of course never have been an early adopter either which may say more about why.... but 4690K FFS, I obviously don't upgrade my CPU very often.

Nothing wrong with Haswell. Your call on the latest and greatest, but your value is current gen Ryzen 3. I just saw a 5800X somewhere for 239 bucks brand new, its a solid processor. However, if your aim is to game get the 5800X3D. It can be had for about a hundred bucks more and its gonna be gaming competitive (ish) with the new gen AMD parts and the current gen Intel parts.

Save some money if you want to. If you're not strapped for cash, next gen parts are gonna be the way to go. But... I wouldn't get on the bandwagon until AMD releases their X3D parts next year, those should be monstrous.

 

[TMCM]

I remember the Abit BP6. I also owned an EPOX board which was another of those exceedingly awesome boards from yester-year.

But in regards to the 2.5Gbe post near the beginning of the thread, my brand new Asus TUF Gaming X570 Pro Wifi has an Intel i255v that I haven't found a single driver that identifies it correctly yet. It is effectively 100% non-functional. I looked it up online, evidently 85% of the i255v onboard adapters have something wrong with them where they either drop packets, randomly stop working or like mine are DOA. I just purchased a newer Intel CT card in the interim. Realtec's 2.5Gbps chip mostly works... There are a couple 10Gbe adapters that can negotiate down to 5, 2.5 in addition to 1Gbps and work correctly. The marvell Aquaius adapter being one of them. I also heard that Marvell will be exiting the desktop adapter market. So Ill stick with the CT card until something stable and worthwhile comes along.

EPOX FTW!!!! Epox got my old Athlon running around 2.5Ghz. That was such a fun system to build and OC.

 

[jfreund]

oh absolutely, this is why they showcase their flagship products first, and the cheaper alternatives for the masses will tend to get little to no fanfare. I just hope they don't pull a Nvidia with the 30 series and over produce 3090s because "there's limited silicon, we can get more money from them with higher end cards, and they've shown they're willing to pay stupid expensive prices".

X670/E is 2 chips, so their margins might be better with the single chip X650. The currently useless PCIe 5 lanes probably drive up the cost, too. If I upgrade this round, I'll be looking for an X650 (no "E") with solid VRM.

 

[serpretetsky]

Here we go with some pricing... Looks pretty darn steep. Not as bad as my gloom and doom predictions but the cheapest one is well over a hundred bucks more than I paid for my ASUS TUF X570 and more than Double than the Aorus Elite X570 I picked up recently.
MSI Reveals X670 Pricing

The X670E has stupid pricing, better make that CPU twice as fast... Somehow I highly doubt it does anything more than add a bunch of features very few people will ever use.

Looks like the low end X670 doesn't even have a PCIE 5.0 Slot on the Board, the main slot looks like it's only PCIE 4.0... So happy I am skipping this gen.

Kind of interesting. On the x670 only the M.2 gets PCIe 5.0. I imagine its the M.2 closest to the CPU due to signal quality issues.

whereas the X670 model will support PCIe 4.0 x16 for GPUs, but a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface for M.2 SSDs.

I guess the x670 probably uses similar PCB materials to previous gen and so barely managed to get the M.2 slot working at PCIE5.

Or maybe they used retimers/redrivers to get all of the M.2 slots to PCIE5, but decided it wasn't worth the cost for the x16 slots.

 

[DanNeely]

Here we go with some pricing... Looks pretty darn steep. Not as bad as my gloom and doom predictions but the cheapest one is well over a hundred bucks more than I paid for my ASUS TUF X570 and more than Double than the Aorus Elite X570 I picked up recently.
MSI Reveals X670 Pricing

The X670E has stupid pricing, better make that CPU twice as fast... Somehow I highly doubt it does anything more than add a bunch of features very few people will ever use.

Looks like the low end X670 doesn't even have a PCIE 5.0 Slot on the Board, the main slot looks like it's only PCIE 4.0... So happy I am skipping this gen.

On everything except the 670E a 5.0 x16 slot is optional.

See the table at the bottom of the page:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1755...hipset-for-ryzen-7000-pcie-5-0-for-mainstream

 

[Legendary Gamer]

On everything except the 670E a 5.0 x16 slot is optional.

See the table at the bottom of the page:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1755...hipset-for-ryzen-7000-pcie-5-0-for-mainstream

So, essentially, all the crap we are seeing injected into most 600 series motherboards is artificially there to drum up pricing. That Anand tech article covers the essentials of each platform and (I know PCI-E 5.0 is gonna cost $$$) there's almost no reason why there isn't a bare bones, stable with good VRM offering for launch.

If I was buying into this next launch I don't need all that bling and added on crap that mobo manufacturers seem to inject into their board designs. I always add that, later, myself with components I WANT. Not a bunch of shit bundled into the cost I will never use.

I think someone on here asked what the hell happened to bare motherboards... I recall a post a couple days ago (maybe on another thread). That's all I want, a bare board with a nice array of slots and some coin slot cream for my ass for the pain of the upgrade and early adoption! Most tech enthusiasts will add all their stuff later, cherry picking the components they want in their rigs. (Or at least that's how I kind of wish it was)

 

[Legendary Gamer]

Kind of interesting. On the x670 only the M.2 gets PCIe 5.0. I imagine its the M.2 closest to the CPU due to signal quality issues.



I guess the x670 probably uses similar PCB materials to previous gen and so barely managed to get the M.2 slot working at PCIE5.

Or maybe they used retimers/redrivers to get all of the M.2 slots to PCIE5, but decided it wasn't worth the cost for the x16 slots.

I think the initial x670 (low end ones) are as DanNeely says, essentially a reskin of the x570 with a couple new features. I don't like how wireless is injected into all the boards... I only use it as a last resort and have always gone the wired route. It should be an option, not a forced one.

We're like 18 days away from actual availability (Is that right? Sept 27th), I wanna see what the hell this platform does in actual performance. However, I think we're gonna get drip fed the new tech. That means, AMD will never show their full hand and just release the best product. They will wait for Intel to counter and then counter punch. That will go one forever if it's allowed.

Was kinda hoping X3D tech was gonna be standard across the entire product stack, with Infinity Cache integrated on the on-die GPUs and just beat the ever living shit out of the competition. Prices would be crazy, but it would be an upgrade that we could all buy into as a substantial one. Not this generational 15ish%, possibly, maybe in some workloads.

My Rant for the week:
Also was kinda hoping AMD was still gonna stick to efficiency but .... that's out the window due to frequency gains and the fact that it doesn't seem to matter to them anymore. I would have imagined we would have already had an ultra low wattage super chip by now. Anyone recall the Phenom II x6 chip on 45nm? It was 95 Watts and was pretty good in the era. It really doesn't seem like much has evolved from 45nm to 5nm. Except frequency-ish and core counts. That's a 12 year old processor... Arguable a shitload better than Piledriver and even Excavator in Single Tread and most benchmarks. What I'm saying is I figured we would be at half the Wattage (45-50 watts) at 22nm, given what has been said about node shrinks over the years and efficiency gains... But we're going to 5nm and sitting between 65 and 170 Watts.

Same can be said for Intel, their efficiency is shit too.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I've zero need for a second GPU, and nothing else on the consumer market needs a x16 slot. I'm also unlikely to add a second expansion card needing 5.0 speeds for anything else either. I'll probably have a 10gb NIC in; but those come with slower PCIe flavors for wider compatibility. And even if I do end up adding a second SSD the real world benefit from 4.0 vs 5.0 is likely to be negligible so putting overflow storage on a slower port won't matter.

Agreed that nothing else requires those Gen 5 (or even Gen 4) bandwidths, but sometimes you have an 8x Gen 2 10Gig NIC or an 8x Gen 2 LSI SAS HBA you want to use.

Maybe with the Gen5 boards we will see more slots coming off of the chipset, as with 4x Gen5 lanes going to the chipset, there should be plenty of spare bandwidth for some secondary/tertiary gen2 or gen3 slots, if you put a PLX style chip in there....

 

[DanNeely]

Agreed that nothing else requires those Gen 5 (or even Gen 4) bandwidths, but sometimes you have an 8x Gen 2 10Gig NIC or an 8x Gen 2 LSI SAS HBA you want to use.

Maybe with the Gen5 boards we will see more slots coming off of the chipset, as with 4x Gen5 lanes going to the chipset, there should be plenty of spare bandwidth for some secondary/tertiary gen2 or gen3 slots, if you put a PLX style chip in there....

Well you might. I won't though, and those are enterprise components; I scoped my nothing else to the consumer market because I knew someone here would be running around with a pile of enterprise gear. And ok, you caught me for forgetting to also scope "second x16 slot" to operating at 5.0 speeds. Enjoy earning fake internet point 34,401 I guess. 🙄

 

[Legendary Gamer]

Well you might. I won't though, and those are enterprise components; I scoped my nothing else to the consumer market because I knew someone here would be running around with a pile of enterprise gear. And ok, you caught me for forgetting to also scope "second x16 slot" to operating at 5.0 speeds. Enjoy earning fake internet point 34,401 I guess. 🙄

I'm a little lost on this... His "fake" internet points are how many times he's posted here. Am I missing something? I didn't think anyone here was attacking anyone else.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Well you might. I won't though, and those are enterprise components; I scoped my nothing else to the consumer market because I knew someone here would be running around with a pile of enterprise gear. And ok, you caught me for forgetting to also scope "second x16 slot" to operating at 5.0 speeds. Enjoy earning fake internet point 34,401 I guess. 🙄

I like having a 10-Gig NIC running to my NAS. It seriously cuts down on transfer speeds.

I don't feel like it is such an exotic thing to do, for consumers to purchase used enterprise pulls.

The cool part is that a single gen 5 lane can carry almost 8 lanes worth of gen 2 bandwidth.

At this point I'm betting that whatever is left on the chipset probably doesn't even need more than one lanes worth of bandwidth at gen 5, especially if you like me, never use on board audio, networking or SATA ports and have them all disabled.

That should leave 3 gen 5 lanes worth of bandwidth free for some PLX:ing for secondary/tertiary PCIe slot use.

I know it's not for everyone, but I wouldn't mind something like this:

PCIe 1 - 16x Gen 5 (for GPU)   Probably not necessary for a while, but we always like providing GPU's ample bandwidth just in case.
PCIe 2 - blank
PCIe 3 - 1x Gen 2 slot
PCIe 4 - 8x Gen 2 slot
PCIe 5 - 8x Gen 2 slot

M.2_1 4x Gen 5
M.2_2 4x Gen 3

I'd even be happy if slots 4 and 5 were combined into a single 8x Gen 3 slot. I could work with that.

This might even convince me that I no longer need a HEDT platform, as I've really only been into them for the PCIe lanes.

I'm kind of hoping someone makes something like this.

Edit:

I forgot they had 24+4 lanes, so after the GPU uses 16x, we still have 8 more lanes in addition to the 4 for the chipset. So this could be even more badass. Maybe one 4x Gen 5 m.2 slot, Two 4x Gen 4 M2 slots and a 4x Gen 3 m.2 slot.

Who doesn't love keeping old drives from previous builds for additional storage?

Thus far most of the boards I have seen just offer three x16 slots in one of:

16x/0x/4x, or 8x/8x/4x all Gen 5.

This is better than nothing, but if they could sneak a PLX chip on there that can use all of that juicy gen 5 bandwidth and expand it into Gen 2 slots, it could make for a really useful board.

 

[DanNeely]

I'm a little lost on this... His "fake" internet points are how many times he's posted here. Am I missing something? I didn't think anyone here was attacking anyone else.

no, that's exactly where the number of fake internet points I counted came from. My ire was because I'd wrote my post with the intent of excluding buying decade old castoffs from fleabay because it's far more niche than just building a high end PC and completely irrelevant to my planned use; which if it doesn't have a 10gb nic on board will be via a new card that will probably be a 3.0 x2 (x4?) card and which can happily connect via 4.0 lanes from the chipset.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I like having a 10-Gig NIC running to my NAS. It seriously cuts down on transfer speeds.

I don't feel like it is such an exotic thing to do, for consumers to purchase used enterprise pulls.

The cool part is that a single gen 5 lane can carry almost 8 lanes worth of gen 2 bandwidth.

At this point I'm betting that whatever is left on the chipset probably doesn't even need more than one lanes worth of bandwidth at gen 5, especially if you like me, never use on board audio, networking or SATA ports and have them all disabled.

That should leave 3 gen 5 lanes worth of bandwidth free for some PLX:ing for secondary/tertiary PCIe slot use.

I know it's not for everyone, but I wouldn't mind something like this:

PCIe 1 - 16x Gen 5 (for GPU)   Probably not necessary for a while, but we always like providing GPU's ample bandwidth just in case.
PCIe 2 - blank
PCIe 3 - 1x Gen 2 slot
PCIe 4 - 8x Gen 2 slot
PCIe 5 - 8x Gen 2 slot

M.2_1 4x Gen 5
M.2_2 4x Gen 3

I'd even be happy if slots 4 and 5 were combined into a single 8x Gen 3 slot. I could work with that.

This might even convince me that I no longer need a HEDT platform, as I've really only been into them for the PCIe lanes.

I'm kind of hoping someone makes something like this.

Edit:

I forgot they had 24+4 lanes, so after the GPU uses 16x, we still have 8 more lanes in addition to the 4 for the chipset. So this could be even more badass. Maybe one 4x Gen 5 m.2 slot, Two 4x Gen 4 M2 slots and a 4x Gen 3 m.2 slot.

Who doesn't love keeping old drives from previous builds for additional storage?

Thus far most of the boards I have seen just offer three x16 slots in one of:

16x/0x/4x, or 8x/8x/4x all Gen 5.

This is better than nothing, but if they could sneak a PLX chip on there that can use all of that juicy gen 5 bandwidth and expand it into Gen 2 slots, it could make for a really useful board.

Actually, looking at this, the most useful one I've seen thus far has actually been MSI's cheapest offering, the $289 Pro x670-p Wifi (ugh, more of that useless wifi on a desktop board) and it doesn't even have any Gen 5 slots!

But the following layout:

16x Gen 4
1x Gen 3
4x Gen 4
2x Gen 4

If anyone ever sees a PLX type adapter that can turn a 4x Gen 4 full height slot into an 8x gen 3 half height slot, I'd be very interested.


Other than for storage, I don't see gen 5 mattering a whole lot, at least not until future gens when we've probably been tempted to upgrade already anyway.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

no, that's exactly where the number of fake internet points I counted came from. My ire was because I'd wrote my post with the intent of excluding buying decade old castoffs from fleabay because it's far more niche than just building a high end PC and completely irrelevant to my planned use; which if it doesn't have a 10gb nic on board will be via a new card that will probably be a 3.0 x2 (x4?) card and which can happily connect via 4.0 lanes from the chipset.

You do you. I'm simply sharing what I find useful. It doesn't have to line up with your needs.

Your response came on a little strong, but whatever. No biggie.

I for one have decades worth of old parts in the spare parts bin. Why would I want to buy new stuff if I already have stuff that does the job just as well? More flexibility on the PCIe lanes is very useful to me.

 

[staknhalo]

i like having wifi on my board

allows me to internet hotspot from phone to pc if internet goes out

also when painting moved computer to another room and just wifi instead of spider-man ethernet across the house

better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it

i tend to feel "why" about bluetooth, but it comes with the wifi, and then i just remind myself of the above

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I'm looking at Asus's proposed offerings for x670 boards right now.

I think it is quite telling that they don't even list the PCIe lane configuration in the headline specs You have to click into the "Learn More" section to see it, and none of the "Learn More" pages are loading for me for some reason right now. (probably Cloudflare being a pain in my ass again, thinking I am some sort of criminal because I care about my privacy and use a VPN for all traffic on my LAN)

PCIe lane configuration is by far my most important spec for deciding what to buy, and it frustrates me to no end that the board makers seem to think it is trivial and unimportant and instead feature their RGB nonsense, on board audio and WIFI that I'll literally never use.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Honestly, if nothing suits my needs, I might just hold on to the Threadripper board longer than I normally would, and install a small and cheap (if there still is such a thing) motherboard in the optional MiniITX second motherboard slot in my Corsair 1000D case, and use that just for games.

It might even be cheaper long run than trying to keep up with upgrading HEDT boards. Just keep an old HEDT board in there for most desktop tasks, and KVM over to the games board for games. I don't need all the PCIe lanes for gaming.

This way I can keep up with a faster more modern CPU for gaming for less money, and still have what I need for everything else.

Still wish I could link the two boards with 10gig networking for fast file transfer between the two though, which might be tough on a lane restricted Mini-ITX board.