AM5 motherboard round up 

0:28 B650M HDV/M.2 4:54 B650M AORUS ELITE AX 6:55 B650E Riptide WIFI 9:50 B650 LiveMixer 13:12 ProArt B650 CREATOR 16:50 X670E PG Lightning 20:38 ROG STRIX B650E-E GAMING WIFI 24:50 B650E AORUS MASTER 29:06 B650E Taichi 33:01 MPG X670E CARBON WIFI 36:40 ProArt X670E CREATOR WIFI 41:54 X670E Taichi 44:45 MEG X670E ACE 47:36 Final thoughts

Every motherboard regardless of price should have a freaking post code. It's one of the most basic features.

"Hi so all you need for a 7800x3d is a $125 board. Cheers." Love your stuff buildzoid, no idea what you're on about usually but this is why I watch your vids

I live in Brazil, by luck a store listed the price wrong and I got a ProArt X670E CREATOR WIFI for the price of $250 boards here. It was still not cheap compared to US (if you convert), but by ours standards it was a bargain.

The USB4 on the B650E Taichi is more valuable than you are thinking. It allows peer to peer USB4 networking @ 40GB. With a Nas or even a server you have fantastic bandwidth. It defeats the need for complicated and more expensive networking solutions. So you can put a capture card on the Taichi and quickly move video, photo etc to the Nas and back without taking up the bottom pcie.

Always appreciate your content, I find your commentary to be on point, and helps cut through the marketing clutter and give us the information we need. My last three motherboards were all based off reviews and board breakdowns you put out there. Your overclocking content has helped me tremendously over the years, especially memory overclocking/timings/etc back during 1st gen Ryzen days ;)

I love the way you are not biased towards any brand and you are representing all boards objectively. Another great video as expected.

Google: what is “external clock gen”

Great overview of all the features most users are likely interested in. Also gave me a little joy that my board was on your list (lol...though when I got it right at AM5 release it was the only MATX B650 [Aorus Elite AX] I could buy ... I've been very happy with it as well). Regardless, thx for all your great work for the community!

Great format for a video! Really enjoyed it.

Thank you, this is much needed info trying to decipher all the options out there.

Just about to make my build and been waiting on this forever, perfect timing for me

These are good info and thanks!. I'm actually resarching and scratch my head to understand the differences.

I’m been waiting for this one video :)

Thanks for this. I've never seen your channel and I'm buying a motherboard for the 7950x that I just got. Very helpful and actually I learned a lot.

Yay! Thank you! I have been waiting for this!!

The best objective review I seen before!

After two, 4+ hour streams, you post your shortest RU-vid video in recent years lol 👍

I am happy with my X670 Arosu Elite, rock solid since purchase even with the VSOC debacle, and so long you dont go around messing and typing the VSOC in the bios you will never have an issue with it.

Hey, nice to see my PG Lightning making it into the list. I have actually bough it for the same reason: a lot of connectivity and a lot of M.2 slots while being totally OK in all the other aspects. Sound is primitive but I have Nu audio sound card. Don't really think I would need anything more that that board. And its cheap (kinda)! P.S. Interesting how many ASRock boards are in the list. They are really making solid options!

This is such a great video on AM5 motherboards. The HDV/M.2 is great to have there at the "bottom" but still being perfectly capable. So like you said, one has to have a specific reason to need anything more than that.

always love the round ups, even if normally buy something completely different lol just lots of info on what to look for and pay attention to

Thank you for posting this video!😊

You are doing the god's work here, mate.

Big thanks, it was a needed full guide and i watched it about 2 times until i choose a motherboard but worth it since i had a big confusion about motherboards and their differences

Love the round up. I was really considering the ProArt but ended up going with the Ace. I use a 10gb fiber card now on my last two PC's but now that PCI slots are getting fewer and sharing bandwidth I wanted 10gb built in this time to keep those PCI slots free. Loving how many USB ports we have now, I use two usb hubs to handle all my gear as a tech/creator so hoping to reduce the number of things off a hub. Both of these boards share bandwidth with USB and the last PCI slot, but the Asus also shares bandwidth with one of the M2 slots. Though Asus has one dedicated video out for intergrated graphics, while MSI you have to sacrifice a USB port to use intergrated (matters when you have 4 monitors like me and want to keep one dedicated gpu spot open for a PCVR headset) I figured the ACE is going to do better with memory, has a bit more future expandability with PCI Gen 5. Just it will be a tight fit on the NV7 case I am building with. I do feel the ACE is overpriced, the Asus was as cheap as $450 and has USB4 but when already spending so much I went and spent the extra to not regret missing a couple of things the Ace has later on, especially as I do plan to upgrade to the 8000 series later. I admit I did kind of let aesthetics be one of the tie breakers, normally I do not do RGB and flashy. I go more workstation, quiet, stable but for some reason I am on this Cyberpunk kick and using a big window case so the Ace will look better in that setting.

I never visited this channel, before. Thanks for the video i learned a lot, I will be back

I have that Gigabyte b65pm Aorus Elite AX and love it. Handles my 7800x3d and ram tuning with ease. Really happy that I went with it.

It might seem weird but one of the reasons I went to X670E Taichi is that like it's X570 Taichi predecessor that I was using, it has great IOMMU groupings if you configure the BIOS correctly. I primarily use Linux with a Windows VM and single GPU passthrough for gaming and practically every PCIe device is in its own IOMMU group making passing the GPU through to the Windows VM very, very easy.

A ton of valuable info here 🙏

Thanks Buildzoid

I have one of the Gigabyte B650E Master boards with the AVX issue. RAM stability was also a pain for the first couple months with XMP essentially not being useable until the March BIOS update. Credit to Gigabyte the board seems to be pretty solid running the new firmware.

Very informational, along with "Lively Editorial Comment"! Thank you, Buildzoid...🇺🇸 😎👍☕

Some more VRM testing video's would be cool, just to see how stable they are making them this generation. 25:45 The shut down issue is a bit concerning there for a mid-end high priced board, they ask these high prices but many boards have concerning issues.

Cheers man! Lots of good info here. Asus doesn't really even remotely tempt me sadly with the shit going on over there these days but a nice insight to AM5 boards!

Is there an updated 2024 version of this?

I love the look of the live mixer. I don’t know what it would go with but I like that’s it’s not just black

Thanks allot BZ.

thank you very much!

The B650 Livemixer is also interesting because besides the x16 slot one of the x4 slots is connected directly to the CPU. This can be beneficial with capture cards or audio.

I just plug a gpu into my motherboard but it's cool to hear what power-users look for in a purchase. Thanks BZ

B650E Taichi is a phenomenal board for single GPU use. External IO is better than many 670 boards, pretty much all other 650 boards, has really good greater than 6000 DDR5 support. Boot times are down to sub 15 seconds from cold boot to desktop with a 4.0 nvme, still slower than good x570/Intel boards but better than many AM5. Things it's notciably missing that would be nice and are somewhat xpected at this price level: Vcore offset for x3d (can be reenabled by ambitious overclockers though) Safeboot/POST fail autorecovery 2 pin thermistor input 4th M.2 via chipset Fractional Eclk speeds eg 100.2, 100.4 etc instead whole steps eg 100, 101, 102. PS: Everyone should boycott Asus until at least Zen5 drops. Asus needs a fiscal lesson in not being shit.

If you use the "ProArt X670E CREATOR WIFI" for professional audio, you have a dedicated soundcard, and it might even use the thunderbolt port. so this makes sense. It might also be a decent board for a hackintosh

37:55 I have that exact board. It does show errors on startup, but it uses colored LEDs to do so

I waited for a while I finally bought my PC upgrade yesterday, the EU prices are pretty high and a lot of card are not in stock anyway wanting an ATX board I was going to go for a B650 Livemixer but the 2 sata port and the 250€ changed my mind. In the end I went for something in my budget with the IO I wanted, a gigabyte B650 gaming X AX. My purchase is arriving on tuesday so I hope all goes well.

Thank you for the video. I never buy a motherboard without watching a Buildzoid review of it. Wish you'd use time stamps or chapters though for a little easier navigating.

Great Video Buildzoid! For me the bottom line of a motherboard is not having an Intel network chip. I've had too many strange behaviors including random lag spikes and disconnects with realtek ones (at alt-tab for example but you could trigger it in many, many ways) likewise a close parent that's also in this hobby for many years, same thing, random disconnects. (An extra: They were mainly by far bad experiences with network but not restricted to it, i have also one Asus Rampage Gene 4 X79 with Intel lan working flawlessly but they used a realtek chip controller to extend the sata ports of the board, this controller, right now is nothing but fully dead from long ago, at least 4 years now, the board works but without those satas) The Realtek latency measured by the DPC Latency (Deferred Procedure Calls) due to the bad drivers are also not good (there's a good article by PCGamer called "Motherboards with 'Killer' network adapters aren't worth your money", it's a few years old but they did a good work there). Unfortunately Asrock due to this "Dragon Killer" brand network (that is mostly just a realtek rebranding with makeup) use it in all their mobos. Others manufacturers tends to reserve it for the cheaper boards like Asus that have been using Intel network controllers in all their boards at Strix level and up (and some TUF). Gigabyte the same, starting usually at Ultra and some PRO. MSI at top boards at top chipsets like Z690+ and X670 with all GodLike, ACE and Unify models and they various versions, except when they use the Marvel 10G lan instead in a board that provides only with 1 lan.

I'm sure there are some consumers out there that purchase their motherboards purely based on aesthetics. I know that you BZ have mentioned before that you bought a certain motherboard because you were attracted to how fantastic it looked!

Have the HDV, great board for everyday use. From boot to windows is quick too.

X670E Taichi does not do passthrough, but it does have the Thunderbolt ports connected to the iGPU so video out is possible.

Regarding the 4 x PCIe gen 5.0 slots, some workloads are bottlenecked by storage speed (ex: when a model is much bigger than VRAM), but you can have several M.2 drives in parallel.

Thanks for the round up! Could you also do a low budget A620 motherboard round up please? Thanks!

The reason you’d want more lanes for PCI Gen 5 is for NVMe raid or similar use cases, one of the reasons I’m looking at motherboards now, I’m running out of space on AM4.

The B650 Proart also has the Displayport passthrough. Found out when trying to connect 2 displays to the igpu.

I think it's worth mentioning the Taichi also has thunderbolt support.

Using that B650E Riptide board, it's been a dream with Hynix A-die kit. Kept my Z97 Haswell system for almost a decade, so with Zen 5/6 compatibility that means I will almost certainly keep this board for a decade by which time a future GPU generation might actually benefit from the PCIe 5.0 slot.

wewwwwww i love these roundups :hyperS:

"Bought it for the colour scheme" isn't something I expect to hear on a Buildzoid video!

"this board does board things". Truly a board of all time

a bit more on the ASUS ROG B650E-E Gaming Wifi: It does have a Thunderbolt "Header" on the Board that you can connect some cheap I/O slot port Card thingy to (Manual Page 1-20). You don't get it on the rear I/O but if you really need it, that sounds like an OK way to get it, i think. ...that header might even be present on lower cost Boards, i have not checked for that. Speaking of Headers, i was also really mad about so many AM5 Boards not having an Optical Port for Sound on the rear I/O anymore (my 5.1 System needs that), but then i noticed there is a SPDIF Header and you can just connect a optical port there, stuff is like 10 bucks... the functionality is there, just not as convenient to access. If you install a M.2 SSD into slot "B" (that is the one between the 2 lower PCIE Slots) it cuts PCIE_X16_1 from x16 to x8 (Manual: Page XI "connectors with shared bandwidth" ...this seems to be the only shared lanes though.) ...and of course that is one of the two M.2 PCIE 5.0 ports, not one of the 4.0 ports. So you probably want to use the 3 other M.2 Ports before touching this one. And can somebody please explain to me, why they aren't putting screwholes into Motherboards for M.2 2230 drives? I got a Steam Deck with a 512GB 2230 drive (the new ASUS ROG Ally also uses 2230), one day that device will die or get too old to bother with and i may want to throw the storage into one of my PCs... do you want me to glue it down with tape?! Is that one screw seriously saving you money? With 4 ports you'd think they add some variation between the less used lengths. ...and why are we putting all the M.2 SSDs behind the GPU anyway? If your SSD craps out, now you have to disassemble half the PC to get to it instead of just pulling out a SATA and Power cable... i'm not sure i'm a fan of M.2 being done this way. I'd rather just have a plugin card for one of the PCI-E ports instead. ...and more PCI-E ports in general. I am also not a fan of the reduction of PCIE ports in general. First they take the 3.25" drive bays out of cases ... now PCIE slots get reduced to the bare minimum. ...PCs are getting less and less modular in design and without those slots being available there are going to be less companies attempting to put innovative stuff in there. I want the crazy days back when they made cigarette lighters for the 5.25" bays, manual Fan Controllers and drive bays... now i need to plug everything into USB and have it awkwardly dangling around... so boring.

Super nice video! :-) thank ypu! Do you think new AM5 boards will be comming out with the new AMD chips comming out later this year that could be better than the Meg X670E ACE? :-)

For the dual GPU config, putting 2 4090s is possible, you get a PCIE4.0x16 extension and plug it into the upper GPU slot, and then let duct tape to do the magic work🎉

Aah not enough tea yet this morning. I was confused looking at the Aorus Elite thinking, mine looks different what the hell... I have the full size B650 (non M) version. I'm happy with it. And yeah the M.2 cooling plates are good, they actually dissipate heat. The M.2 plates on my X570 Aorus Master seemed to be more like a nice looking cover. Perhaps the drives just weren't getting as warm.

I bought the B650 live mixer despite only two sata ports cause it's pretty much the only fitting board that offers two x4 expansion slots... my plans are to install a sata controller in the wifi M.2 E key slot and SATA port multipliers if that works.

Building an AM5 video rig right now, what I've learned in retrospect: 1. Forget RGB. Adds a rat's nest, complexity and cost. Raw naked functionality has it's own sexiness. 2. You only need an air cooler. I bought a 360 rad and case to support it from the nonsense Linus 95F video. Cost and complexity and weight. On the bench I ended up setting an old Pentium heatsink and fan on top of the processor because it stayed at 100mghz. 3. You only need a 650w PSU. I wasted tons on $$$ 1200w and pretty cables. My mobo only supports one GPU, so waste. 4. Only buy two matched sticks of RAM kit. Don't mix two different pairs like I did for 128gb. Nightmare of not booting until I watched some video and found out, DDR5 ain't as tolerant like the old days. 5. If you go 4 sticks, forget XMP/EXPO rpofiles, your speed will drop down to 3600 across all sticks. All the cost of DDR5 with none of the benefits. 6. Run your CPU in 110 watt eco mode, basically sthe same the 5950x used, and it will stay chill as a cucumber. 7. I still h8t3 EFI BIOS. It's pretty once your in it, sure, but all the rest of the tiem waiting on your PC to post or do anything at all you're faced with a dead black screen. No user feedback, no beeps, no video, nothign. FOr sometimes... minutes. Tell Alexa to start counting so you can time it and know how long it usually takes for your PC to post. Watch a video on how to speed up Ryzen boot times. 8. Like he said in another video, until youg et it to post and get video out, you'll make friends with that CMOS clear button. I've never pressed the CMOS clear button so much in my life. I must of pressed that thing 50 times before I figured out my mismatched two different sets of RAM sticks problem. Save your profiles, that helps get back to where you were faster. 9. I want to run Windows 7 on my system, so a whole other world of h377 awaits me. Look up running WIndows 7 on new hardware. Basically, these mobo manufacturers don't support you, you have to get an ISO with at least USB drivers rolled into it just to be able to use a keyboard and mouse during install. 10. Pull up your motherboard manual PDF on screen on another computer, so you can see where al the headers are and go and your front panel IO. Good luck. If I had to do it all again, and I'm not done... I wouldn't.... and would keep right on using my FX-8350. It's been a nonstop nightmare. And I've uilt and or repaired at least 500 PC's in my life. This is a whole new level of ev1l... and time consuming. Very time consuming. Because I'm blind now, and doing it all mostly by blurry vision and by feel. I haven't hated a platform more than I am h8t1ng AM5 right now... since... well... I bought an IBM xSeries 455 Itanium 2 server back in the early 2000's. Yeah, that was a dog. Swore I'd never,e ver, ever buy anything with an EFI BIOS ever again. Oh well. I'm sure Intel is just as bad.

I watched the HUB B650 mobo roundup and was leaning towards the Aorus Pro AX, and the PG Lightning. These seem to be a decent price, good VRMs, 3x m.2 slots. This video is good to get some context. E.g. the 7k series don't really need beefy vrms cos they are not power supply limited. Good to know. I think i would still get something with decent VRMs in case 8k or 9k series need it cos my plan is to upgrade to AM5 7800x3d from an i7 3770k and when AM5 is end of life, get whatever the latest X3D cpu is at the time and be good for another 4r5 yrs. So keeping in mind some features to future proof.

Love the AMD content :)

The insanity of motherboard manufacturers makes me want to barf. $700 for a $350 motherboard. $700 is high end HEDT pricing (note - high end, not halo).

We need a round-up of just motherboards that include two PCI-Express 5.0 x8 slots. Bring the real contenders to the front.

Nice roundup. I went with the proart x670e. Stability has been an absolute mess, but made the decision for pretty much the exact reason mentioned; the combination of i/o (especially dual x8 + thunderbolt). The ProArt b650 also has DP in btw, and I think there may be another one or two boards out there supporting this. Unfortunately I've still not had success getting my silly LG 5k 27MD5KLB working at native resolution through it (tb3 input *only*). Was also having issues with the wireless drivers crashing so swapped that out for an intel 6e adapter. Plus of course all the asus bs currently going on. As for the comments on why someone might have so many m.2 drives - IMO a real use case is keeping multi OS installs separate. No need to worry about updating GRUB or windows doing weird stuff when it detects another os or another windows boot drive present at time of installation. Real data goes on a separate drive, and I don't have to worry when it comes time to nuke a boot drive and install something else. Less cables is a nice little bonus too if you're constantly screwing around adding/removing random hardware too..lol

Oh snap its that time again!!!!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉

7:43 Guess what linus tech tips just did XD

I greatly appreciate this kind of content. Certainly solidifies my pick of the b650e-e. I just won't pay $300 to not have a post code, so the options are very limited there especially with how the aorus master has been discontinued.

ProArt: I expect the reasoning behind the PCIe slot spacing is that if they moved the second x8 down you wouldn't be able to fit a second graphics card anyway in most cases because it'd run into the PSU shroud (or case bottom). AFAIK Buildzoid tends to run all his in open bench so this is not a factor for him but I expect very few Creator boards are used that way. Not having optical out might be a bummer but AFAIK most that could care have long since transition either to Thunderbolt or USB connected audio equipment so again, might come down to knowing their target market. Thunderbolt: I expect it's a trademark/certification issue - at least earlier Intel refused to allow to use the name Thunderbolt and logos on AMD. Officially this was due to the Intel's driver not implementing "memory protection" on AMD. IE, Thunderbolt is PCIe so unless the driver sets things up "just right" it's possible to read any memory on the system via TB, often including things that even the OS can't read like Intel/AMD firmware TPM areas! My understanding is that this potentially could allow BitLocker bypass and "modify windows while running to accept any password". IIRC this requirement was added in TB4, a lot of earlier (TB1-3) drivers tends to not allow TB PCIe devices until you manually "approve" them in the OS due to this... This provides SOME protection but if the user had approved any external devices it wouldn't be hard to clone the PCI IDs and then use that on an attack device to bypass this, so the requirement makes sense, the issue is that Intel makes the TB chips and thus the DRIVER for it, and at least at that point has only bothered to implemented this on newer Intel CPUs. The fact that none of the AM5 motherboards mention Thunderbolt hints that this may still be the case.

I was going to get the B650E Aorus Master, but what put me off was the fact the GPU slot drops to 5x8 if you populate the third or fourth M.2 slot.

Got the ROG Strip B650E-E along with 7800x3d and 64gb 6000c30, very happy :)

So what do you think about the actual Asus AM5 issue, which GN covered these days?

B650e aorus master has been flawless so far I got one when i picked up the 7950x3d at launch. I got it for $350 at microcenter, on paper the asrock taichi has a better vrm setup but the master seems to run cooler from the test I’ve seen but that was the boards i was looking at when i did my build. I seen no reason at all to get an X board this time around. Also really like having a backplate on the motherboard makes it fill more premium. My main things were good vrm and a post code reader.

Is there a video where the external clock gen stuff is explained? And is it a way to get around the AMD gimping of clock speeds on the 7800x3d?

Highly recommend Gigabyte b650 boards. They use thick pcbs

Thnk you for making & good bye.

thats a nice video, but which one should I buy :-D I really miss those E-ATX x670E mobos. their gone allreay :-(

Audio workstations tend to use USB or Thunderbolt interfaces, so optical out is almost never used.

I had to return the gigabyte b650m aorus elite ax due to the coil wine. I went with the msi mag b650 tomahawk. No complaints

The B650 PG lightning is the most standout there within B series mobo IMHO. It actually soldout anywhere at my country.

You should add a temp sensor header to your list of features. A lot of motherboards don't seem to like adding 2 pins that cost barely anything to motherboards and Asus has been removing that from a lot of their boards lately. Doesn't sound like that big of a deal but it's very, VERY nice to have for custom loop builds, so you don't have to have your fans constantly ramp up and down for short loads that isn't going to affect the water temperature. I know you can add it via external fan controllers, but those things are ass to work with, break every 2 weeks, and don't work on linux for us neeks who like having an OS that respects it's users.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the reasoning for the B650E Aorus Master being priced so high is due to its limited availabilty...because it's discontinued. I don't think it ever had a proper restock.

You're wrong about the post codes, the reason you don't need post codes on Asus boards is Asus boards never fail to post 🤣🤣

Think the only real bonus with going for a high end board in this AM5 platform is the extra lanes you get I got the Asus X670E Extreme for that reason Gen z M.2 is great to work with but the price is eye watering.

Would love to see a A620 motherboard roundup

Dual x8 pci-e was like the default until very recently, it's baffling they cost $260 and then $400

The Live Mixer board reminds me of the old DFI Lan Party boards - viva fluorescent orange and green!

With the MSI carbon. If you are running only one GPU, but 2 m.2 SSDS. Will you get gen 5 x16 on the GPU and gen 5 x4 on both m.2s? So no cutting on PCI lanes?

10gbe and thunderbolt are relevant for video production people who use a NAS and handle lots of large files. Audio engineers use interfaces that connect through usb, which then goes out to mixing monitors via xlr.

Thank you very much! This video was really helpful... ...to realize the whole pc motherboard market is fkkd up - because of *reasons*. 😅

Honestly I’m happy with my x670e Carbon. Not having eCLK sucks but OC videos were pretty underwhelming in the performance boost using the external generator. I’d like the Ace but I’m not spending an additional $350 for 5-10% in “some” applications.

After everything that happened with asus I was going to get a b650e-e for my 7800x3d. Ended up saying forget that and saw the msi x670e carbon on sale for 440 and went with that instead. Asus definitely needs to learn from what they did and I've heard some decent things on msi so I'll give em a shot.

Being a first time builder, it really gives me a peace of mind to see Buildzoid giving a recommendation on the B650E PG Riptide 😊. Thanks! Just wondering how this board can stand the test of time as I planned to use this for >10 years with upgrades along the way

Requirements: 2 USB3 headers for 4 front USB3 + 1 type C , heaps of Fan headers, Postcode, wifi, and dont care about other pcie slots ...have a monster that makes them useless. And I like something that looks good and doesnt have problems ie Rog Hero 670e btw: does the future AMD6 ?? cpus will require all the extra power stages etc ? btw2: would love to see motherboards with no SSD's .... dont use them and its so good for cabling

Thinking if 8-layer PCB of the B650M AORUS ELITE AX matters (maybe for memory overclocking of future CPUs)