[SOLVED] MSI MAG B550M Mortar WiFi or Gigabyte B450 Auros Pro Wifi

[SirMonkeyV]

Hello. I bought a $129 Gigabyte B450 Auros Pro WIFI to buy with a Ryzen 5 3600 and 16 GB RAM. It is still shipping to me. I saw that there is a MSI MAG B550M Mortar WIFI for $170 being released on June 16, which is $40 more. I could return the Gigabyte. The Gigabyte has slightly better sound and is $40 cheaper, but the MSI will have B550, PCIE4.0, WIFI 6, Bluetooth 5 (instead of 4.2) and better VRAMS. It is also more likely to support Zen 3 since I will probably upgrade to it once Zen 4 comes out. B450 will support Zen 3, but could potentially not have all the features or not at all based on which board. After Zen 3, they will probably go to AM5 and DDR5. Are these reasons worth it to spend $40 more? I don't need WifI 6, and no GPU today benefits from PCIE 4.0. Any SSD that uses it is also not worth it to me over a normal SATA SSD since the loading times for games and windows is at most 3 seconds different. I most likely want to keep the motherboard for 5 years, so is there a possibility PCIE 4 will become useful in a mid or low-end GPU in 5 years? A 2080-Ti doesn't use it, but a RX 5600 XT apparently does?
Will I miss out by not getting the MSI B550? Is $40 more worth it for futureproofing? I feel like I already spent a lot on the Gigabyte B450. Should I just stick to what I bought already? Thank you.

 

[ScrewySqrl]

you should be fine for now with the 450 you already bought.

unless you really, really need PCIe 4.0, you'll be fine with it.

you won't be be to upgrade with it (the 4000s and up will be not be added to the 400 series boards for space reasons), but wou l will be able to use the existing cpu for several years, so that's probably moot.

 

[SirMonkeyV]

you should be fine for now with the 450 you already bought.

unless you really, really need PCIe 4.0, you'll be fine with it.

you won't be be to upgrade with it (the 4000s and up will be not be added to the 400 series boards for space reasons), but wou l will be able to use the existing cpu for several years, so that's probably moot.

Thank you for your reply. Did AMD not reverse their decision and decide to release the code or whatever, leaving it up to the manufacturer to support Ryzen 4000 on B450? Though I realize it will be uncertain and dependent on Gigabyte. MSI promised all B450 will support Ryzen 4000, but you might have to prove purchase of a Ryzen 4000 to get the BIOS update and might not get every feature. Am I missing something?

 

[ScrewySqrl]

pretty much what MSI is promising, but there are no guarantees they will be able to do it. The Memory limitation are real and very hard to work around. In any case, I would suspect if you're buying a 3000-series chip now, you will be using it until the 5000 or 6000 series comes out, so it will be moot by then anyway - the 4xx boards will not support 5000 and later . At least, I wouldn't buy an incremental improvement only a few months later.

 

[SirMonkeyV]

pretty much what MSI is promising, but there are no guarantees they will be able to do it. The Memory limitation are real and very hard to work around. In any case, I would suspect if you're buying a 3000-series chip now, you will be using it until the 5000 or 6000 series comes out, so it will be moot by then anyway - the 4xx boards will not support 5000 and later . At least, I wouldn't buy an incremental improvement only a few months later.

Thanks for your reply. My plan is to maybe upgrade to Zen 3 when Zen 4 or 5 comes out. I used my 4th gen i5 fine for 6 years, so I think if I upgrade to Ryzen 4000 in 2 or 3 years, I could stay till Ryzen 10,000 or 9000. If I'm not wrong, CPUs keep improving slower, so I should be fine? Though now with actual competition, it could be faster. Though I'll certainly want to upgrade my GPU before then.

I only buy mid-range to low end GPUs. I currently have RX 580. Currently, 2080 Ti doesn't use it, but it makes small difference for one AMD GPU according to one video on YouTube. Do you think I'll need it by then?
The only reason I'll get the b550 is for a GPU and if I can't get Zen 3.
Sorry for a bit of rambling. I'm indecisive.