Asking a dumb storage related question relating to B650 and X670 boards

[FreedomEclipse]

Basically Im a poor boy and ive got a tight budget to stick to so i have to ask a dumb question to make sure I get it right.

I need support for:

2x Sata HDDs
2x Sata SSDs
2x (or even 3x) NvMe SSDs.

Will B650 have enough PCI-E lanes or will i need to go X670?

- Its a dumb question, Im not very smart but I know that Z-370 liked to disable sata ports if you wanted to use NvMe at full Gen 3 speeds and everything ended up being needlessly overly complicated and a mish mash of speeds. So i'm trying to avoid all that.

If you can humour me. id appreciate it.

 

[tabascosauz]

Basically Im a poor boy and ive got a tight budget to stick to so i have to ask a dumb question to make sure I get it right.

I need support for:

2x Sata HDDs
2x Sata SSDs
2x (or even 3x) NvMe SSDs.

Will B650 have enough PCI-E lanes or will i need to go X670?

- Its a dumb question, Im not very smart but I know that Z-370 liked to disable sata ports if you wanted to use NvMe at full Gen 3 speeds and everything ended up being needlessly overly complicated and a mish mash of speeds. So i'm trying to avoid all that.

If you can humour me. id appreciate it.

Honestly I think PCH bandwidth sharing limitations is a very 2017 thing, for both AMD and Intel. On the AMD side it was no longer really a thing even after 2019/2020 with the X570/B550 release. Having 4 x SATA is not a big deal unless you are on ITX.

Here's the board list if you want to explore the specific boards you want. Even the shitty mATX ones have 4 x SATA. Most if not all of them should have 2 decent speed NVMe slots. A lot of the upper midrange or better ones have 3. For 4 NVMes it would have to be X670, generally.

I know you say you want to save a buck; get something on par with or better than the B650M HDV M.2, and you'll be set on the VRM side. 4 x SATA and 2 x NVMe.

AM5 Motherboards Sheet (X670/B650/A620) - Google Sheets

 

[KedsDead]

I think there is a limited selection of 3x M.2 650 boards.. I could be wrong on that as I have never looked for any. The only thing I would be sure of, if that if all 3 m.2 slots are occupied that it does not take any lanes from the PCIex16 GPU slot. Other than that, you should be golden.

So I did a quick check on the cheapest 650 board with 3 m.2 slots, the Ryzen 7600 has 24 lanes, so pick your poison.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Honestly I think PCH bandwidth sharing limitations is a very 2017 thing, for both AMD and Intel. On the AMD side it was no longer really a thing even after 2019/2020 with the X57/B550 release. Having 4 x SATA is not a big deal unless you are on ITX.

Here's the board list if you want to explore the specific boards you want. Even the shitty mATX ones have 4 x SATA. Most if not all of them should have 2 decent speed NVMe slots. A lot of the upper midrange or better ones have 3. For 4 NVMes it would have to be X670, generally.

I know you say you want to save a buck; get something on par with or better than the B650M HDV M.2, and you'll be set on the VRM side. 4 x SATA and 2 x NVMe.

AM5 Motherboards Sheet (X670/B650/A620) - Google Sheets

Thanks. When i say saving a buck i mean not going for the X670 option which was going to absolutely destroy my wallet so I'm quite happy getting a decent 650 board.


Thanks for your advice. despite watching hardware unboxed 650 video - the spreadsheet was super helpful.

I think there is a limited selection of 3x M.2 650 boards.. I could be wrong on that as I have never looked for any. The only thing I would be sure of, if that if all 3 m.2 slots are occupied that it does not take any lanes from the PCIex16 GPU slot. Other than that, you should be golden.

3x NvMe is optional. Im currently running 3 right now but one is in a PCi-E riser. Im happy with 2. if there is room for a 3rd then its a bonus.

 

[KedsDead]

Then it just comes down to ATX or Micro ATX.. ATX (3) Micro (2)

 

[tabascosauz]

Thanks. When i say saving a buck i mean not going for the X670 option which was going to absolutely destroy my wallet so I'm quite happy getting a decent 650 board.

Thanks for your advice. despite watching hardware unboxed 650 video - the spreadsheet was super helpful.

3x NvMe is optional. Im currently running 3 right now but one is in a PCi-E riser. Im happy with 2. if there is room for a 3rd then its a bonus.

Yeah that makes sense. For most users' needs, X670E will only be necessary if a high end board that one really wants just happens to be X670. HWUB probably still has a good list of recommendations as to what boards are good though. Then just double check any boards you're interested in against the AM5 list.

That double PCH setup really does hike the price of the boards.

Then it just comes down to ATX or Micro ATX.. ATX (3) Micro (2)

No...? Info is all there in the list.

Just because the CPUs only have 28 lanes, doesn't mean M.2 slots can't be wired to the PCH.

 

[KedsDead]

I meant for 3.. most of the ones I looked at (quick glance, really) the 2 of the 3 slots were connected to the CPU. Since all the 7000 series, 7600 and above have 24 lanes, its all good. And the size reference, was directed as what size board he wants.

The cheapest board on newegg is the Gigabyte B650 ATX with 3 m.2 slots. 2 connected to the Cpu and 1 to the chipset. He has a riser card, so he doesnt need all three. so a decent enough 650 board, micro atx will do, Just needs to pay attention to the size of the slot for the riser, some are full length, some are not.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Narrowed it down the options to being either ROG Strix B650E-F or the Strix B650E-E. Most likely the E as AM5 is going to last a long time and I want a decent board to carry me at least 4-6 years with maybe one or two drop in CPU upgrades.

 

[tabascosauz]

Narrowed it down the options to being either ROG Strix B650E-F or the Strix B650E-E. Most likely the E as AM5 is going to last a long time and I want a decent board to carry me at least 4-6 years with maybe one or two drop in CPU upgrades.

Strix E looks good - but post code and CMOS button are my weakness

the price is really getting up there into X670 territory with the Strix-E though..........

 

[KedsDead]

Wow.. I have never spent that much on a motherboard, and I used to have an X99 rig..

I'm a Gigabyte (motherboard) fan.. I have owned several over the 20+ years and have never had an issue with one. Even the cheap Ultra Durables have been rock solid for me.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Strix E looks good - but post code and CMOS button are my weakness

the price is really getting up there into X670 territory with the Strix-E though..........

I got a little time. Going to see if I can pick it up on sale somewhere

 

[tabascosauz]

Wow.. I have never spent that much on a motherboard, and I used to have an X99 rig..

I'm a Gigabyte (motherboard) fan.. I have owned several over the 20+ years and have never had an issue with one. Even the cheap Ultra Durables have been rock solid for me.

No need to pony up for Strix-E, but considering what a bare minimum (HDV) costs these days, that sort of pricing is unfortunately long gone...

Gigabyte does make physically very solid boards. They have a bunch of B650 boards in the 200-260 range.

 

[ir_cow]

Wow.. I have never spent that much on a motherboard, and I used to have an X99 rig..

Your in for a treat. While high end use to be $300 during the X99 days, it's now 700+

 

[kapone32]

A board that the OP could use would be the MSI B650E Pro. That board looks to have everything you are looking for and is well priced.

MSI PRO B650-S WIFI AM5 AMD B650 Ryzen 7000 DDR5 PCI-E x16 slot Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth SATA 6Gb/s ATX Motherboard - Newegg.com

Buy MSI PRO B650-S WIFI AM5 AMD B650 Ryzen 7000 DDR5 PCI-E x16 slot Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth SATA 6Gb/s ATX Motherboard with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.ca

 

[tabascosauz]

A board that the OP could use would be the MSI B650E Pro. That board looks to have everything you are looking for and is well priced.

MSI PRO B650-S WIFI AM5 AMD B650 Ryzen 7000 DDR5 PCI-E x16 slot Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth SATA 6Gb/s ATX Motherboard - Newegg.com

Buy MSI PRO B650-S WIFI AM5 AMD B650 Ryzen 7000 DDR5 PCI-E x16 slot Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth SATA 6Gb/s ATX Motherboard with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.ca

MSI is advertising a discrete VRM for this board, so 6-phase doubled lo-side is a pretty big no-no considering even the HDV/M.2 would be much better than that

 

[DaemonForce]

Honestly I think PCH bandwidth sharing limitations is a very 2017 thing, for both AMD and Intel. On the AMD side it was no longer really a thing even after 2019/2020 with the X570/B550 release.

Hahahahaha I was thinking this when I got my X570 TUF board. Plugged in my GPU, network card and then wanted to add capture and it said NUH UH.

(CPU)
M_2 g4x4
g4x16
blank (PCH separation)
g4x1
g4x4
M_2 g4x4
g4x1

There are 8x Sata on this board in total and half of them shut off when the lower M.2 slot and x1 are populated. Guess what else shuts off...Other PCI-E ports.

The way I do cable organization has me hiding cables and disks behind the board, arranging them in some very specific ways before installing this main assembly into the case. Which means my usual population on the very bottom ports 5&6 becomes a non-option when reusing my sata devices the moment I have any plans on playing around with M.2 RAID or just having a pair of M.2 drives on the board. Attempts to add PCI-E x1 cards like a USB out or capture device nets the same response. It doesn't see the boot device and doesn't see any cards plugged in while I have my RX 580 and SolarFlare populating the respective long slots. Either I'm out of PCI-E bandwidth or the chipset can't handle all three jobs of PCI-E card in x4, M.2 in x4 and any amount of sata.

This of course isn't mentioned anywhere in the manual or purchase guide but shows up as a common question on some forums, which....Is a really fun way to find out.

This chart was pretty much the only clue about it and that's still vague af:

Which also makes me suspicious of anything on X670 and newer when similar data charts come out:

Things like this are why I hate modern design. I get that compromises have to be made here and there to make cool stuff but this is a fully featured board that was $200 when I picked one up in 2019 and it's still $200 today. I have no plans on building a NAS with my Ryzen system and no plans to retire it until maybe 2028. It's just inconvenient that I have to switch to another set of sata ports that exist at an angle on the board and I like having clean cables that are out of the way. The real annoyance is that I can't add a capture card and have to resort to dragging out my FX rack (with +2 PCI-E options than I have here) that may as well do the real heavy lifting for my gaming/streaming tests. This is such a stupid minutia to get stuck on and it's no wonder so many of my friends get so confused over this nerd junk. We're not cramming a bunch of disks into our main systems and we're not dropping $$$$ on some workstation board that offers us no real world advantage in what we're doing at that price point.

 

[KrazyT]

Stupid answer, but why not external drives ?
Seems external SSD are fast enough these days ?

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Stupid answer, but why not external drives ?
Seems external SSD are fast enough these days ?

Would make sense if I was going to be sticking with this Z-370 setup. But I assumed the PCH sharing thing would be fixed by now so I wouldnt have to.

 

[AsRock]

You say you plan to us the board for 4-6 years i say you may as well go 670x, typically better cooling on VRM's and up to 4 Nvme's +2 sata and on top of that higher speed NvME later when the prices have dropped on them.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

You say you plan to us the board for 4-6 years i say you may as well go 670x, typically better cooling on VRM's and up to 4 Nvme's +2 sata and on top of that higher speed NvME later when the prices have dropped on them.

As someone who was running their boot SSD at 2x speed instead of 4x (Gen 3) and a WD 550mb/s Msata as a gaming drive for the longest time due to Z-370 being Z-370. Im honestly not too bothered. There is still plenty of room for me to step up storage capacity if i do need it. Swapping out older SSDs or hard drives for more capacity and adding the old drives to my NAS.

It was only in the last 6 months where i decided to try and juggle the storage config a little to see if i could unlock 4x speeds - which meant replacing the Msata in favour of an NvMe....which then deleted some Sata slots and overly complicated things.

 

[AsRock]

As someone who was running their boot SSD at 2x speed instead of 4x (Gen 3) and a WD 550mb/s Msata as a gaming drive for the longest time due to Z-370 being Z-370. Im honestly not too bothered. There is still plenty of room for me to step up storage capacity if i do need it. Swapping out older SSDs or hard drives for more capacity and adding the old drives to my NAS.

It was only in the last 6 months where i decided to try and juggle the storage config a little to see if i could unlock 4x speeds - which meant replacing the Msata in favour of an NvMe....which then deleted some Sata slots and overly complicated things.

Same here recently. How ever i have ended up needing the extra one without loosing space. With my board i can run 4 NvME and 4 Sata just that one NvME would be x2.

But then again i don't have the option of a NAS.

 

[KedsDead]

With this current board, I have my nvme running at x2.0 for the boot drive, and the m.2 sata is in the top slot. They are both 1tb drives, so I use them both to store games, I just kinda place them for either single player or multi for the most part.

When I got this board for my kid, it had a 500meg nvme 3.0x4 and a 2.5in sata's for storage. When he upgraded his pc (3 kids, only one left to kick out, I mean, let grow up and get out of the house) I decided to use this board for an upgrade. Thats when I noticed the top slot is a shared nvme/sata and the bottom is not. I have thought about replaced the m.2 sata with a new nvme drive, but I dont have anything to put that drive into and I already have several 2.5in sata drives just sitting in the closet. Since I have put this together, it has been a rock, doesnt stutter or anything. Since I put this 7900xt in this thing, I am seeing that 5600x3d working it ass off. Glad I am done with undervolting the 7900xt, so I dont have to see that CPU util up at 80+%. Looking forward to next gen x3d.

Anyway, off topic. Just remember to read the manual for which ever board you choose. With Gen5 being an option and gen4 nvme being just as fast, I dont think your will have an issue with Sata ports being disabled. I dont think we will see that issue on high end boards until more peripherals starts becoming gen5 and actually using it.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

I think Even the cheaper B650E-F model has one PCi-E 5 slot so i dont have to pay the premium for the E if i dont want to. I'll probably weigh both of them up at some stage but the E model seems to be massively more popular on amazon than the cheaper F.

 

[kapone32]

I think Even the cheaper B650E-F model has one PCi-E 5 slot so i dont have to pay the premium for the E if i dont want to. I'll probably weigh both of them up at some stage but the E model seems to be massively more popular on amazon than the cheaper F.

It looks like the main difference between those 2 boards is how the PCI e lanes are split. The E board has 4 M2 slots and it looks like the 2nd x16 slot may be wired at x4 with one of the 2nd M2 slots being wired to that slot and sharing x4/4 when you populate it for up to 3 5.0 M2 drives. The F board seems to have way more SATA and they may not share lanes as you get 3 M2 and a x1. AM5 boards are better, the worst board was the Asus B550 F non wifi. That board had every PCIe slot connected to each other than the CPU, So if you added a WIFI card in 1 of the 3 x1 slots you could not use the 2nd x16 slot with any type of expansion card.

 

[tabascosauz]

Hahahahaha I was thinking this when I got my X570 TUF board. Plugged in my GPU, network card and then wanted to add capture and it said NUH UH.
View attachment 339832
(CPU)
M_2 g4x4
g4x16
blank (PCH separation)
g4x1
g4x4
M_2 g4x4
g4x1

There are 8x Sata on this board in total and half of them shut off when the lower M.2 slot and x1 are populated. Guess what else shuts off...Other PCI-E ports.

The way I do cable organization has me hiding cables and disks behind the board, arranging them in some very specific ways before installing this main assembly into the case. Which means my usual population on the very bottom ports 5&6 becomes a non-option when reusing my sata devices the moment I have any plans on playing around with M.2 RAID or just having a pair of M.2 drives on the board. Attempts to add PCI-E x1 cards like a USB out or capture device nets the same response. It doesn't see the boot device and doesn't see any cards plugged in while I have my RX 580 and SolarFlare populating the respective long slots. Either I'm out of PCI-E bandwidth or the chipset can't handle all three jobs of PCI-E card in x4, M.2 in x4 and any amount of sata.

This of course isn't mentioned anywhere in the manual or purchase guide but shows up as a common question on some forums, which....Is a really fun way to find out.

This chart was pretty much the only clue about it and that's still vague af:
View attachment 339837

Which also makes me suspicious of anything on X670 and newer when similar data charts come out:
View attachment 339839

Things like this are why I hate modern design. I get that compromises have to be made here and there to make cool stuff but this is a fully featured board that was $200 when I picked one up in 2019 and it's still $200 today. I have no plans on building a NAS with my Ryzen system and no plans to retire it until maybe 2028. It's just inconvenient that I have to switch to another set of sata ports that exist at an angle on the board and I like having clean cables that are out of the way. The real annoyance is that I can't add a capture card and have to resort to dragging out my FX rack (with +2 PCI-E options than I have here) that may as well do the real heavy lifting for my gaming/streaming tests. This is such a stupid minutia to get stuck on and it's no wonder so many of my friends get so confused over this nerd junk. We're not cramming a bunch of disks into our main systems and we're not dropping $$$$ on some workstation board that offers us no real world advantage in what we're doing at that price point.

Hmmmm........I was referring more to the systemic PCIe and SATA sharing that occurred across pretty much every X470 and B450 board back in the day. This one on the TUF Plus seems more like a board-specific or one-off issue? Can't seem to find even on other forums, any widespread complaints on this issue. But then again, most builds these days have moved away from PCIe devices and use only one or two NVMes, so info is probably scarce.

I did see something as to half the SATA on the TUF Plus getting disabled, though.