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Choosing the right motherboard

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Wheelzup

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I'm finally upgrading my 10-year-old AMD 4 system because it's really bogging down when I'm using Photoshop and Dreamweaver. The games I play are becoming nearly impossible to play with stuttering and crashing. Below is a list of parts, some already have. I'm trying to decide which board would fit my needs.

I have everything I need for a decent system except I'm trying to figure out what motherboard to pair with an AMD 7950X CPU.
and a pair of 4 TB M.2 Patriot Viper VP4300 Lite M.2 PCIe Gen 4 x4 4TB SSD, Solid State Drives. I have a ton of photos that eventually find their way through Photoshop and the extra storage makes sense. In time I might add another drive. I managed to get an XFX 9070 XT video card for $600.00 (found it at Walmart). Everything else I have, power supply a 1200w SAMA XP, and a Montech King 95 Pro case and a Thermal-Right AIO. I still have a Sound Blaster AE-5 Plus that worked great in my old system and would like to try and use it. It was running on my Z-5500 speakers that still make the house shake when playing games or music when I'm working.:)

I'm stuck with which motherboard to finish up the system. I have narrowed it down to 3 boards: An Asrock X870E Taichi Lite board, Gigabyte X870E AORUS Pro ICE and
Which one of these boards would be good for at least 5 years into the future? Or would I be better off getting a B850 or B650 series chipset?

I don't think I left anything out?

Any suggestions/changes would be helpful.

Quote Reply
 
Based on your post you a motherboard with ok VRMs, 3nvme slots, a pcie slot for a graphics card and a 1x pcie slot or better that isn't too close to the GPU pcie slot.

Those motherboards are all overkill. If you want pcie 5 for "future proofing" most B850 have it, if you want USB 4 get X870, otherwise even most B650 boards will suffice.
 
What are your networking requirements? Do you need/want WiFi? Do you have a use for 2.5GbE? How about USB requirements?
 
anonuser57 said:
Based on your post you a motherboard with ok VRMs, 3nvme slots, a pcie slot for a graphics card and a 1x pcie slot or better that isn't too close to the GPU pcie slot.

Those motherboards are all overkill. If you want pcie 5 for "future proofing" most B850 have it, if you want USB 4 get X870, otherwise even most B650 boards will suffice.
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I looked at the B850 and B650 and they are lower in cost but some are more expensive than some of the X870 boards without the features I'm interested in. I'm looking to retire in three years so I'm thinking that my income will change and since I can still afford it, I'm hoping to future proof it now. Especially when it comes to adding more storage without slowing down or disabling any of the PCIE and M.2 slots.
 
Konomi said:
What are your networking requirements? Do you need/want WiFi? Do you have a use for 2.5GbE? How about USB requirements?
Click to expand...
My network is small with my desktop and one laptop which are both connected by ethernet. WiFi isn't a priority but I do have it if I need it for some reason. Right now, I'm paying for 600MB down and up but I can move up to 3 or 4 GB if I need it. The USB ports are important since I have 5 devices connected (via a hub) now and I need something that's fast enough to handle an external Blu-Ray/DVD drive. Many of the photos that are sent to me to work with are on discs or thumb drives.
 
I recently chose to build with the X870E Aorus Elite Wifi7 ICE which is very similarly spec'd to the Pro albeit with weaker VRMs, I've been pretty happy with it so far, so the Aorus Pro gets my vote, It's a much better board and doesn't use that atrocious Realtek ALC40XX which is wired up through a USB interface for audio that the Asrock is using, Another thing to note is that Asrock still haven't figured out or explained in detail the cause of why so many CPU's are being killed in their boards, if you're curious just look at the Asrock subreddit to see a horror show.
 
What about X670E boards? Here the MSI x670E Gaming Plus Wifi is significantly cheaper than X870E boards and on par with higher end B650/B860 boards. You can use all slots without disabling anything.
 
After more research I've narrowed it down to either an MSI B850 board or the Aorus X870E Elite board. Sound shouldn't be an issue since the last upgrade I made to my old AM 4 (MSI) board was a Sound Blaster AE-5 Plus. It should work on either board I end up with. Early on I tried Asus boards but never had any of them last very long.
 
The Aorus X870E Elite is probably one of the best boards available currently at its price point feature wise. Plus the NVME heatsinks are legit on it and can keep a gen5 drive cool easily.
 
Looks like you'll really use up lots of m.2 slots, you might be one of the few people these boards were actually designed for. Just so you know though the 5x16 shares bandwidth with the second and third gen 5 M.2 slots on the Aorus X870E Elite :roll:
 
Rover4444 said:
the 5x16 shares bandwidth with the second and third gen 5 M.2 slots on the Aorus X870E Elite
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The optimal config is a Gen5 NVME in the top slot, a GPU in the first 16x, and a Gen4 NVME in the M2D_SB slot which is routed through the chipset/southbridge PCIE lanes which amounts to no bifurcation, Though realistically I don't think the 16X dropping to 8X would be a noticeable loss in performance, margin of error at best for the current gen of GPUs.
 
Shadowized said:
The optimal config is a Gen5 NVME in the top slot, a GPU in the first 16x, and a Gen4 NVME in the M2D_SB slot which is routed through the chipset/southbridge PCIE lanes which amounts to no bifurcation, Though realistically I don't think the 16X dropping to 8X would be a noticeable loss in performance, margin of error at best for the current gen of GPUs.
Click to expand...
Doesn't matter either way as all the X870E boards have sticklers like that in their spec sheet if they use more than one gen 5 M.2, with X870 being even worse! He'll definitely be dropping down to x8 once he adds another SSD though. I agree that it's not really much of a problem unless you're strapped for VRAM and have a card with an x16 interface, but it is something to be mindful of.
 
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