Question B450 Tomahawk or X370 Gaming Pro?

[Filipe Baltazar]

Where I live the 2nd gen Ryzen motherboards increased in price by a lot compared to the previous B350. Because of this and a considerable drop in price of X370 motherboards it's actually more expensive to buy lower end B450's than a full size X370 motherboard. Right now the X370 Gaming Pro is almost 30 Euros cheaper than the B450 Tomahawk (almost 140 Euros). I've heard that 2nd gen motherboards are better built and are more compatible with memory. I want to overclock but only on the stock CPU cooler.
For my needs a B350/450 is more than plentiful but the price dictates a lot too.
Am I loosing a lot in quality and long term use with the X370 to consider a newer Tomahawk?
I am planning on using an R3 2200G for a while and later on get a much beefier 2600 or 3000 series and a dedicated GPU too.
Components like the case, PSU, motherboard, RAM, SSD's, are intended to be unchanged for the life time of the build, only CPU and GPU are intended to be the major changes.

 

[korv]

I'm pretty sure the better chipset are for overclockers. X370 should be fine as it probably will support the 3rd gen cpus.

 

[Filipe Baltazar]

Thanks.

 

[drea.drechsler]

Where I live the 2nd gen Ryzen motherboards increased in price by a lot compared to the previous B350. Because of this and a considerable drop in price of X370 motherboards it's actually more expensive to buy lower end B450's than a full size X370 motherboard. Right now the X370 Gaming Pro is almost 30 Euros cheaper than the B450 Tomahawk (almost 140 Euros). I've heard that 2nd gen motherboards are better built and are more compatible with memory. I want to overclock but only on the stock CPU cooler.
For my needs a B350/450 is more than plentiful but the price dictates a lot too.
Am I loosing a lot in quality and long term use with the X370 to consider a newer Tomahawk?
I am planning on using an R3 2200G for a while and later on get a much beefier 2600 or 3000 series and a dedicated GPU too.
Components like the case, PSU, motherboard, RAM, SSD's, are intended to be unchanged for the life time of the build, only CPU and GPU are intended to be the major changes.

The chipset really has nothing to do with overclocking ability, excepting the A320 chipset which doesn't overclock at all. The one significant difference in chipsets (B350/B450/X370/X470) is the number of PCIe lanes available to peripherals. But the X370/X470 chipset are connoted with 'high end' and so those boards tend to get better VRM's which would allow for better overclocking.

Except MSI really up-graded the VRMs with their gen2 boards (B450/X470). So the thing about the X370 Gaming Pro is it has an above-average 4-phase VRM with a very good heatsink on the FET's, certainly much better than most any of the B350 offerings. But the B450 Tomahawk comes along and it has a beefy 4 phase VRM, with 4 FET's per phase, and a very good heatsink so it's pretty darn good over clocking board too. But neither of these are by any means boards to try any extreme overclocking on.

One thing that may or may not be true is that mfr's improved memory compatibility with 2nd gen boards. In theory, improved layout of traces between CPU and memory sockets could do it but that's hard to demonstrate since AMD also improved memory compatibility of their AGESA code so much at the same time. So which is it that did the trick?

So in other words it's hard to say which board is better beyond the simple fact that the X370 board has more connectivity due to more PCIe lanes being available. But if you choose the X370 board, make sure the BIOS is updated to be Ryzen 2000 ready or it won't work for your 2200G processor.

 

[Filipe Baltazar]

The chipset really has nothing to do with overclocking ability, excepting the A320 chipset which doesn't overclock at all. The one significant difference in chipsets (B350/B450/X370/X470) is the number of PCIe lanes available to peripherals. But the X370/X470 chipset are connoted with 'high end' and so those boards tend to get better VRM's which would allow for better overclocking.

Except MSI really up-graded the VRMs with their gen2 boards (B450/X470). So the thing about the X370 Gaming Pro is it has an above-average 4-phase VRM with a very good heatsink on the FET's, certainly much better than most any of the B350 offerings. But the B450 Tomahawk comes along and it has a beefy 4 phase VRM, with 4 FET's per phase, and a very good heatsink so it's pretty darn good over clocking board too. But neither of these are by any means boards to try any extreme overclocking on.

One thing that may or may not be true is that mfr's improved memory compatibility with 2nd gen boards. In theory, improved layout of traces between CPU and memory sockets could do it but that's hard to demonstrate since AMD also improved memory compatibility of their AGESA code so much at the same time. So which is it that did the trick?

So in other words it's hard to say which board is better beyond the simple fact that the X370 board has more connectivity due to more PCIe lanes being available. But if you choose the X370 board, make sure the BIOS is updated to be Ryzen 2000 ready or it won't work for your 2200G processor.

I don't plan on ever making an extreme build that pushes the limits of the hardware so even if the X370 has slightly worse VRM, FET's, and cooling, it shouldn't make much of a difference. It's that I can't find a cheaper full size B450 that is trustworthy and a micro ATX looks really weird on a full size case.