B550 or X570?

mickyflinn · 15 Oct 2020 at 09:41

Vogon said:
Cool thanks.
I may as well save myself £50 and avoid a potential point of failure/noise in future (chipset fan) and go with a B550

Your wecome

What cpu are you getting ?

Msi are doing cashback on motherboard and ryzen cpu combos, they have to purchased together from participating retailers.

https://uk.msi.com/Promotion/back-to-school-2020#AMD-Motherboard

Vogon · 15 Oct 2020 at 09:57

Well its not quite cashback, its a steam voucher if you read the small print

But it ends before the Zen 3's are out, I am ~~after~~ hope to get one of those

BigBANGtheory · 15 Oct 2020 at 11:26

Vogon said:
Cool thanks.
I may as well save myself £50 and avoid a potential point of failure/noise in future (chipset fan) and go with a B550

Yes your earlier assessment is fair, for your use case but here is the kicker.... To get a B550 board with the equivalent (or better) VRM components/loadout/cooling they are looking as expensive if not more than the X570s in most cases.

I'm not trying to pick apart your purchase decision btw you'll be good with either option, where I'm coming from I guess is the high end B550 boards cost as much as the mid-range X570's but have less options/features i.e. they are overpriced imho you might as well go for a good X570 like the OP is toying with.

Vogon · 15 Oct 2020 at 11:35

Yes all being equal cost wise, an X570 would be the choice.
But the MSI Tomahawks have a £50 difference atm. I am not averse to spending a bit more if there is a tangible benefit, but in this instance I can't see one.
There is also another consideration that may matter to some ... the B550 cant support as many older gen cpus as the X570. That does come into it as I may want to get a cheap cpu to learn may way around the bios and settings prior to Zen 3 release.( it's been many a year since I have played with AMD)

Vogon · 18 Oct 2020 at 17:30

Ah well, I used my "other logic" .. whenever I get the step down I always feel a bit like I cheaped out, so I caved and ordered the Tomahawk X570.

Its now sitting here with a few more bits of hardware, awaiting Zen3, in the meantime a little 3200g is arriving so I can have a play

Spikey · 18 Oct 2020 at 18:40

Vogon said:
Cool thanks.
I may as well save myself £50 and avoid a potential point of failure/noise in future (chipset fan) and go with a B550

I've got the X570 tomahawk and the fan rarely spins up bar boot up so I wouldn't base any decisions on the fan whatsoever it's a none issue on this board.

Smrtka · 21 Oct 2020 at 10:02

The x570 tomahawk is a lot more expensive then the b550 and the b550 seems to come with two rj45 that can be useful for some virtual machines, I am seriously wondering if the 570 is worth the extra ? I only want 1pcie gen for for boot drive, rest of it is Sata SSD and one GPU, and ideally 5800x zen 3, there is lot of conflicting info of which to get...

mickyflinn · 21 Oct 2020 at 10:09

Smrtka said:
The x570 tomahawk is a lot more expensive then the b550 and the b550 seems to come with two rj45 that can be useful for some virtual machines, I am seriously wondering if the 570 is worth the extra ? I only want 1pcie gen for for boot drive, rest of it is Sata SSD and one GPU, and ideally 5800x zen 3, there is lot of conflicting info of which to get...

Seems like b550 suits your needs.

Mesai · 21 Oct 2020 at 10:26

Was initially going to get the Asus ROG Strix B550-F Gaming (Wi-Fi), but decided that the X570 Tomahawk is probably the better bet if I want to add a PCI4.0 M.2 drive as the primary, and re-purpose my 3.0 one as the secondary drive without having to deal with shared lane performance issues.

Smrtka · 21 Oct 2020 at 10:36

Mesai said:
Was initially going to get the Asus ROG Strix B550-F Gaming (Wi-Fi), but decided that the X570 Tomahawk is probably the better bet if I want to add a PCI4.0 M.2 drive as the primary, and re-purpose my 3.0 one as the secondary drive without having to deal with shared lane performance issues.

I can only see a x570 tomahawk with wifi, is that the correct version?

Mesai · 21 Oct 2020 at 10:43

Smrtka said:
I can only see a x570 tomahawk with wifi, is that the correct version?

Yea, that's the one. I'm getting the WiFi just in case, but if you look at other boards with similar performance, they're either the same price or more expensive, so whether you need WiFi or not, it's still a great price (considering a WiFi card is around £30).

This is a pretty good link if you want to compare price to performance (https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1137619-motherboard-vrm-tier-list-v2-currently-amd-only/).

BigBANGtheory · 21 Oct 2020 at 12:24

Smrtka said:
The x570 tomahawk is a lot more expensive then the b550 and the b550 seems to come with two rj45 that can be useful for some virtual machines, I am seriously wondering if the 570 is worth the extra ? I only want 1pcie gen for for boot drive, rest of it is Sata SSD and one GPU, and ideally 5800x zen 3, there is lot of conflicting info of which to get...

There is a lot of misleading and conflicting info I agree.

If you only ever see yourself running with 1 PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive then the B550 is probably the right choice for you, just go for a good one and you're sorted

Smrtka · 21 Oct 2020 at 12:47

BigBANGtheory said:
There is a lot of misleading and conflicting info I agree.

If you only ever see yourself running with 1 PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive then the B550 is probably the right choice for you, just go for a good one and you're sorted

I don't think i will, I use ssds for games, so i will just have one gen4m.2 for boot/apps however i will likely overclock the 5800x but looking at the link above seems like the 550 and the 570 tomahawk both have same power delivery... So I guess it should be same oc standard