Buying a motherboard can be a daunting task if you’re a novice PC builder. Even for those who are more experienced, if you’ve been out of the loop for a while, it can be tough to get back up to speed. AMD certainly weren’t helping matters when they refreshed their AM5 motherboard lineup with the launch of Zen 5. The segmentation between each chipset type is a bit murky, and you wouldn’t be blamed for not understanding the difference between an X870 and an X670 motherboard. While this isn’t a full breakdown of what each chipset is capable of, here are five ways you can make choosing an AM5 motherboard less confusing.
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5
Identify your needs
What will you be primarily using your PC for?
Getting the most out of your motherboard means choosing one with features that fit your use case. For some, this means going all out, buying the most expensive option with all the bells and whistles. While this is a valid approach to ensure your bases are covered, it’s rather scattershot, and you can get a lot more bang for your buck if you use your dollars deliberately. The first step to procuring an AM5 board is identifying what you need it to do. If your system is mainly for gaming, you shouldn’t worry about PCIe and GPP lanes. For productivity users, though, it’s important to consider these factors because of the number of devices you may or may not be running.
Overclocking is also something to consider. If you’re planning on grabbing a capable CPU and squeezing some extra juice from it, note that B840 and A620 motherboards don’t support overclocking. While the rest of the boards in the AM5 spread are capable of overclocking, your mileage may vary depending on the board and its VRM quality.
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4
Count your devices
If you feel like you might have a lot, you probably do
If you’re running more than a couple of drives via PCIe, it’s important you count how many lanes you’ll need. It’s actually quite difficult to completely saturate every possible lane, but there are few lanes that will be capable of the highest speed advertised. If you have an array of drives or you plan on using a ton of individual storage devices, chipsets like the X870E, X870, and X670E are adequate and provide plenty of PCIe 5.0 lanes for your devices if they support them. If you have any USB devices that would benefit from USB4 speeds, the X870 and X870E chipsets come standard with at least 1 USB4 port, allowing for 20Gbps transfer speeds. This is important for tasks like ingesting lots of photos and videos from something like an external SSD.
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3
Choose between B and X-series boards
The naming convention doesn’t tell you the full story
Choosing between B and X-series boards can seem a bit confusing, especially considering AMD has further muddied the waters by “promoting” certain chipsets up a tier without actually offering any new functionality. If having bleeding-edge storage speed and some slightly better I/O doesn’t suit your fancy, that’s okay. The B-series chipsets, both 600 and 800, offer the same performance and base functionality as the X-series chipsets. You’re not missing out on any frames in your favorite games by going with a B-series board.
One significant exception to note, however, is the case of the A620 and B840 boards. The A620 has been given a “refresh” in the form of a B840, and with it, the product name was given a significant bump up to the “B” range. You might think this would come with better features and higher quality components, making it closer to the B850, but it actually isn’t at all. It’s still an A-series board through and through and can only run the absolute basics.
Another factor to note is that both the 600 and 800 series support Zen 5 processors. You just might need a BIOS update for the former before it will function properly. B650 boards, as of now, are great value and typically pack enough features for the average gaming build. From there, the X-series boards don’t offer anything in terms of performance but are much more solid for connectivity, as stated before.
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B-series AMD motherboards are more than good enough
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2
Don’t worry about VRMs
Most motherboards today are more than capable
Source: XDA-Developers
Today, most mid-to high-range motherboards offer VRMs capable of handling essentially all CPUs available for the given socket. This is a welcome change from the days of woefully inadequate power delivery within even mid-range motherboards. These days, you don’t really have to worry about VRMs unless you’re pinching pennies. VRM cooling and the quality of the VRMs themselves are usually quite good on the full gamut of B and X series boards, especially. As stated before, the A-series chipset boards, including the B840, will not have VRMs capable of getting the most out of high-end CPUs and should be avoided if you’re trying to drive a Ryzen 9000 CPU, for example. Unless you’re doing some extreme overclocking, most boards from that level onwards will be just fine for almost all applications, VRM-wise.
1
Forget about PCIe 5.0
It’s just not worth paying a premium for
If you’re looking at the breakdown of all the chipset features from top to bottom, don’t let the omission of PCIe 5.0 be the difference in your purchase decision. It’s honestly just not worth it. In day-to-day workloads, even at the productivity level, you won’t see gains in performance that are worth paying extra for. Even if you were to run your GPU at PCIe 3.0 speeds, you probably wouldn’t notice unless you were under some kind of VRAM bottleneck. PCIe 4.0 is more than enough, even for the foreseeable future.
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A good motherboard is one you don’t notice
Choosing a motherboard that fits your needs is essential, but in most scenarios, that means you have a ton of options available to you. This can quickly become overwhelming, but it is difficult to go wrong. Generally, if you need a basic board that allows for performance features like EXPO but doesn’t include all the expensive bells and whistles, going with a B650 or B850 board is more than enough. For those who need higher connectivity and are building more of a workstation, an X-series board is much better suited.
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source: https://www.xda-developers.com/choosing-right-am5-motherboard/
