[SOLVED] New 3600 build- wait for b550?

[josteve39]

Hi All,

I'm looking to buy the components for a new build over the next month, with the goal of a gaming rig i can get a good few years out of.

I plan on grabbing a Ryzen 3600 and dont know whether it is worth waiting for B550 (im looking at mATX boards)? My instincts say yes, but inevitably the prices will be steeper than the current b450s, and i don't really want to be spending more than the 90 euro price.

Other than a bit better of an upgrade path is there any major reason to wait for b550?

I plan to pair it with either a rx 5600XT (maybe a rx5700 if i find a deal) or RTX2060, along with 16GB DDR4-3200.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[cdrkf]

Hi All,

I'm looking to buy the components for a new build over the next month, with the goal of a gaming rig i can get a good few years out of.

I plan on grabbing a Ryzen 3600 and dont know whether it is worth waiting for B550 (im looking at mATX boards)? My instincts say yes, but inevitably the prices will be steeper than the current b450s, and i don't really want to be spending more than the 90 euro price.

Other than a bit better of an upgrade path is there any major reason to wait for b550?

I plan to pair it with either a rx 5600XT (maybe a rx5700 if i find a deal) or RTX2060, along with 16GB DDR4-3200.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

There are two reasons to go for a B550 motherboard:
1: Upgrade path (as you mention) - the B450 chipset boards are now set to get one final bios update to support upcoming Zen 3 based cpu's later this year but AMD have confirmed that will be the last cpu to support B450. B550 would technically support future generations - although currently there aren't any public plans for another generation on AM4 after Zen 3 so it's difficult to know how important this is (Zen 4 is supposed to be moving to a new socket + support for DDR5 memory, although plans might change).

2: PCIe 4.0 support - B450 is limited to the older PCIe 3.0. It's currently not really an issue as current graphics boards aren't fast enough for the higher bandwidth to make a measurable difference (with the exception of the RX 5500 series as these only use a x8 interface rather than x16 they do drop a bit of performance on PCIe 3). That might change with next gen cards which are supposed to be quite a bit faster - however I also remember the transition from PCIe 2 to PCIe 3 and it took a good few gens of cards before it made enough of a difference to really worry about. The other advantage of PCIe 4.0 is support for Gen 4 NVME drives as these have much higher peak throughput, although they are expensive and the real world benefit of Gen 4 NVME over Gen 3 NVME is questionable as it's only really sequential performance that gets better (whereas games and general use typically need fast access time and random read / write performance - this is why in most cases even a good quality Sata SSD performs similarly for most real tasks).

I would say you are safe enough going for B450 board if you want to get something asap - although have a shop around for entry level X570 chipset boards as these already have all the above support and often aren't that much more. If you do stick with B450 though you do already have an upgrade path to a 16 core cpu if needed in the future.

 

[Flayed]

Prices seem to have jumped on some of the B450 boards of late