Question Decent AM5 650/670 motherboard with enough accessible PCIe slots

[mjonis]

While I'm still investigating (that's a diff. post) a new set of upgrades to play Diablo 4 (haha), at the very least I've decided upon an AMD AM5 motherboard (yes, I know I'll need a lot of new stuff).

Looks like the 650/670 chipsets are probably what I want. I used to like ASUS (have their old Prime one for my Ryzen 5 2600), but after seeing their fiasco lately (and pricing) I'm OK with Gigabyte, MSI, and possibly ASrock. However, it seems so far, that all of the Gigabyte/MSI 650/670 boards I've looked at (trying to keep around $250 or less), have at most 3 PCIe slots. (I haven't looked too much into the ASrock ones). The 3 PCIe slots seems to be problematic because.....

OK, one/two get taken up by the new video card. By two I mean that almost every review I've seen says that when you plug in the new video card, they're almost always wide enough to end up covering/preventing use of the 2nd PCIe slot. Which means in reality you have only one more useable PCIe slot. My two uses would be:

1) eSATA card (I do occasional PC work for folks and it's soooo much faster to use an eSATA port to clone/abuse/whatever the persons hard drive vs. USB--even USB 3.0 I find slow).

2) Creative Labs audio card (I've never been really impressed with on-board audio, although perhaps the newer boards don't suck as much?) I use an older Logitech 5.1 speaker setup (but sounds good, to me, anyway), and I think on my ASUS board now ( the old Prime) it didn't have the proper connectors to make full use of the speaker setup, so that's why I went with the Creative Labs sound card.

Thanks!

 

[drea.drechsler]

....

OK, one/two get taken up by the new video card. By two I mean that almost every review I've seen says that when you plug in the new video card, they're almost always wide enough to end up covering/preventing use of the 2nd PCIe slot. Which means in reality you have only one more useable PCIe slot. My two uses would be:
....

When talking about many of the current breed of high-end GPU's you're really seeing 3 PCIe slots being taken up as they sit either 2.5 slot or 3 full slots wide. And not only that but even if you can populate the nearest slot the add-in card will quite likely block air flow into the GPU so that's also impractical.

My suggestion is look for a board with an open PCIe slot above the GPU...on the side nearest the CPU. It will most likely be an x1 slot, but that works for LAN cards, WiFi, audio. The last most popular AIC is a PCIE NVME expansion card that really needs an x16 to get 4 or an x4 to get one.

 

[mjonis]

Thanks for the suggestion! Also I was able to find a Sabrent USB-C external hard drive dock that'll do what I need to do and USB-C (and USB 3.1) is fast enough for what I desire. Thanks again!