After 13 years of 2500k –> AM5 is my next step. Advice needed.

[beakmaster]

Hey everybody, I hope this is the right subforum to ask? If not please move it accordingly. 

So... after being on a 2500k @ 5.2GHz for almost 13 years now, I feel it's time for something new. Since I don't change my system like every year or so (obviously :D), I'm eyeing the AM5 platform to be my best bet on possible future upgrades if AMD is going to keep its promise to release a few more cpus for this socket in the next few years. 

Basically right now I'm a bit in trouble with finding the right mainboard and I hope you guys can help. I'm planning on buying an "E" chipset board, so that I have PCIe5 should I need it in the future and a 7800X3D is supposed to be seated on that board, together with a pair of 6000 MT/s DDR5 2x32GB sticks. 

Like probably many of you, I'm used to times where there was a lot of choice when it comes to motherboards with like 20 brands available to choose from. In todays landscape... well... what do we have? ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, ASRock seem to be the only main players left.

In the past few weeks, I watched many reviews / roundups and what not on YouTube like from Gamers Nexus and so on, thinking it will bring out that one board, I want to go for. But well... that didn't happen. It only brought up more questions and things to think about.

This is where I need your help. If you have a 400€ budget for a mainboard – what "E" chipset board would you choose?

I'm finding it a bit hard to decide as I don't have any recent experiences with boards from those four players. Back in the days, AsRock was some kind of low end budget solution, MSI always looked polished on paper but their boards often had serious bugs or didn't perform as well as intended or came with design issues / quality problems. Gigabyte boards I always found to be rock stable, starting with my first GA-7DXR back in the days and ASUS even then had a huge fragmentation in both quality and features and about the only ASUS board I had back then was the P4C800-E DLX but only to pair it with a CT-479. Other than that, I was more of an ABIT user, soaking up everything Oskar Wu had to offer back then to get the most out of these platforms before he went to DFI.

That being said, when I watched through those reviews, Gigabyte – because of my good experience in the past – was my favorite so far and I was leaning towards deciding for a B650E Aorus Master. BUT... then I looked deeper into that board and found that it supposedly is bugged with weird crashing when being loaded with AVX workloads. So I looked at the ASUS ROG Strix B650E -E Gaming Wifi but a friend of mine recently told me that ASUS support and customer care has basically been going down the drain and that they actually were the last brand to acknowledge and fix the X3D dying when PBO was being used and they're basically always the last brand to add support for new CPUs, at least he said that's been the case on AM4. 

So what do you guys think? What's your experience with the brands, their support, their quality and reliability of their products? I want something that can carry me for at least 5 years to come and will provide a good experience. 

Do you know if that B650E Aorus Master problem has been solved by GIGABYTE? Do you have any other recommendations regarding a solid board with good features in the 280-400€ price range? It can be X670E or B650E, doesn't really matter but since I don't need tons of connectivity, I deemed the 650E would give me more bang for the buck. I want at least one M2 SSD connected with PCIe5 and two M2 PCIe4.0 SSDs in the system and being able to plug them in, without downgrading any other connection on the board. I only need one 16x PCIe5 though for the GPU, but that should always be able to run at x16. 

Also, I think of getting 2x 32GB RAM 6000MT/s with possibly low latency like CL30 and AMD Expo support. Is there anything significant to watch out for? Like is it still like back in the days where you had special sticks that had TCCD / BH-5 / D9GMH chips on them, allowing you either to aim for high memory freqs or tighter timings? 

I appreciate anything you can offer to help me with this.

Thanks

Edited February 16 by beakmaster

[Leeghoofd]

I build a few ASUS ROG Strix B650E-F Gaming WIFI setups for gamers, though not with 64GB, only 32GB

[TASOS]

It seems like you come a long way (into computer world)
You probably know what you want and what you are really looking for.

But ... What will you be doing with your new computer ?

Yes AM5 is the right choice today we are talking (cause of future support).

But if you are not a fanatic gamer ... why pick an ...X3D series cpu and why 64GB of ram ?

Go for a more mainstream option.

[wutske]

I have no experience with the Asus support but aren't people's view of support a bit skewed due to the handling of the VSoc issue on X3D chips ? You should also ask yourself how important it is that they are not last for adding new CPU's. How often are you going to switch to a new CPU ?

As for the memory, B-die is the way to go, Samsungs are to be avoided. However, most manufacturers now know the value of B-die's so you'll have to pay a good surplus. There's this github but it's pretty outdated: https://benzhaomin.github.io/bdiefinder/, but as usual it can be a lottery (e.g. Corsair switches chips with every version of their sticks). If you have about an hour of spare time ->

 

Other than that, expect pain and suffering when you want to memory train 64GB, it'll take a while.

[beakmaster]

On 2/16/2024 at 7:34 PM, TASOS said:

But ... What will you be doing with your new computer ?

 

On 2/16/2024 at 7:34 PM, TASOS said:

But if you are not a fanatic gamer ... why pick an ...X3D series cpu and why 64GB of ram ?

 

Well, this machine is solely planned as a gaming machine. Therefor I had the impression the 7800X3D gives about the best performance in most games for a reasonable price. Application performance is not a concern here. 64GB of RAM was my understanding of being ready for future requirements. I see games allocate more and more memory and from what I've seen, 32GB is sufficient for now, but what will be in like 2-3 years? Or would it make sense then to upgrade anyway because speeds will have gone up by then? If so, 32GB will do for a start. I'm a sucker for huge open world games, which in some reviews already munch easily through 20-25GB of RAM, depending on the settings you play on. So yeah, I don't know, just thought 64 might be safer then? 

 

19 hours ago, wutske said:

How often are you going to switch to a new CPU ?

 

I guess that will depend on the performance benefit to gain. Maybe I won't directly upgrade to the next generation on release day, but it's important for me not to be stuck on a platform that doesn't receive BIOS updates just because the manufacturer doesn't give a damn on its customers. 

[spit051261]

Whatever you build today will be old hat in a few months.

Look how RAM has come along.

Good luck anyway and hope all goes well for you 🙂

[wutske]

On 2/19/2024 at 1:01 PM, beakmaster said:

I guess that will depend on the performance benefit to gain. Maybe I won't directly upgrade to the next generation on release day, but it's important for me not to be stuck on a platform that doesn't receive BIOS updates just because the manufacturer doesn't give a damn on its customers. 

I haven't followed it all in detail, but considering that a 5800X3D chip is considered a drop-in replacement for a 2000-series, I think that if you're patient enough, you'll get the BIOS update you need (unless you go for some shady China-only motherboard from Ali).

 

The past doesn't always define the future, but I have a couple of old Gigabyte motherboards and they are rock solid. My older MSI's are bit more wonky, I had on with a dual BIOS that failed because ... both BIOS'es died (and they had already been replaced in the past). That and another MSI board are horrible when it comes to recovering from a failed overclock.

That said, I can't really seem to find anything significant about an AVX bug on Gigabyte boards. Got any links ?

[beakmaster]

On 2/26/2024 at 1:30 PM, wutske said:

That said, I can't really seem to find anything significant about an AVX bug on Gigabyte boards. Got any links ?

 

Yeah, it's basically about this:

There are some videos on YouTube regarding this issue as well.