I'll check out that AM5 roundup video later today!!! I just read a quick review of that cooler and I think I like it! I was mainly doing the big ass AIO cooler to keep things quite and knowing that it would cool whatever the last high end AM5 cpu at EOL of the platform but that thermalright looks like it will be able to handle whatever you throw at it and still stay quite
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X670E mobo for 7800X3D and other recommendations
- Thread starter TMCM
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I'll check out that AM5 roundup video later today!!! I just read a quick review of that cooler and I think I like it! I was mainly doing the big ass AIO cooler to keep things quite and knowing that it would cool whatever the last high end AM5 cpu at EOL of the platform but that thermalright looks like it will be able to handle whatever you throw at it and still stay quite
KickAssCop
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I think the MSI X670E Tomahawk is the best priced X670E mobo that is also available.
pendragon1
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yeah that 420 aio is gonna cool it real nice, while being quiet.
StoleMyOwnCar
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I'm not sure if you'd get much benefit from it to be honest. A 420 is made for something like a 7950X or maybe even a 13900KF. It's way, way overkill for this chip, which uses like 90 or so watts on a good day. At some point you'd be hearing more pump noise than fan noise. I think the cooler I linked you to would be almost dead silent on it. Like that video I linked was using a stock cooler from an older AM5 processor lol... and it wasn't thermal throttling on it.
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pendragon1
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you are.
StoleMyOwnCar
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Yeah that's fair.
That was my bad, OP. I get real chatty when I'm exhausted. I deleted everything not having to do with your cooler concerns from that post. I might go through and clean up the other O/T posts I made, if you care. Might repost it elsewhere.
You are concerned about motherboard I/O and that's the main thing I suggest watching that video I linked for. He goes over PCIE lane distribution a bit, and tells you about some of the things that might be shared. On this MSI Carbon, all 4 of the NVME drives work at the same time, and it doesn't seem like it sacrifices anything to do it. It only has 6 SATA ports, but I guess that's not too big of a deal since they seem to all work at the same time as the NVME slots (I spread out the plugs on purpose to test that). But I wouldn't have bought it, if it was at its $460 MSRP (somehow it also lacks external clock gen for that price lol). I bought it because it was $200.
For your part, simply think about what you're going to really need the motherboard to have plugged in. I personally don't see why you'd really need a gen 5 drive. I think even a plain old gen 3 NVME drive would do plenty fine for anything. I think even B650M would do just fine for you if you don't need much SATA. I feel like X670E is way overpriced right now, and even B650E is kind of... high priced for what's supposed to be a "budget"-ish board, that cuts out lanes. It's kind of a weird market. I would really just get the most budget of boards possible, that ticked all of my I/O options if this one wasn't on sale, and that is my recommendation to you. Hopefully the next gen AM5 boards will be better, and then you can just use the saved money to upgrade to one of those, if you feel like it. It's your call. Tomahawk is usually a good "budget high end" board, so I agree with KickAssCop. Though the AM5 version of the Tomahawk is is kinda slightly suboptimal in lane distribution, and still $300. I don't know if you care. It still has a lot going for it, so it might be the best bet if you want to break into X670E for PCIE5 and whatnot.
With regards to cooling... I'll note that I'm running Prime95 on my 7800X3D right now, on this cooler (was $40):
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/DMjG3C/noctua-nh-u14s-8252-cfm-cpu-cooler-nh-u14s
The maximum temperature I've seen is still under 70C (when the fans reached a steady state speed). It's basically silent. The cooler I'm recommending to you is a much bigger one, I believe, and it has two fans. I think you'd be fine on it. At the very least I don't think you need a gigantic cooler. Depends on how much you care about saving money. I would go air cooling on this chip for less annoyances with radiator mounting personally, but it's fine if you want to get a big 420mm to use on a later CPU that will possibly use more
I'm running Hogwarts Legacy now (er a bit after that last image) and the maximum temp I see on the CPU (and yes it is boosting to 5Ghz) is about 63-64C. I can show my airflow setup if you would like, but yeah this chip is far from hard to cool.
Sorry, wall of text, again, tired.
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The main reason for the big AIO cooler was so that it could handle whatever high power cpu is released for the last cpu of the am5 socket. Buying a cheap 620m chipset mobo only to replace the mobo and year or two from now is what I'm trying to avoid
I got the Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL and the Arctic Cooling Liquid Freezer II 420 just for that reason. But also consider that the cooler, with a mechanical pump, wont last forever.
StoleMyOwnCar
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I think most pumps last long enough (I have many several years old AIOs, they just get a bit louder over time), but I still think a 420mm is kind of crazy. I guess you could also consider this cooler, I have heard good things about it.
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/Py6p99/icegiant-prosiphon-elite-cpu-cooler-prosiphon-elite
It is massive, however, and kind of expensive. Can be hard to find at a good price. I see an open box one at the Microcenter near me for ~$80. I considered it, but it was simply unnecessary for this CPU. But you have a point, it might be nice to get something you won't generally have to replace. That said, I kind of don't think that the "X3D" line of CPUs are going to really grow in wattage that much? Each gen seems to just get more efficient...
As far as motherboards, yeah you're probably going to be looking at something like the one I have or maybe even more expensive if you really want a completely futureproof board that you won't be too tempted to replace. This one has excellent I/O, but it sucks for overclocking because of no external clockgen, not sure if that's a dealbreaker for you. Also it's, again, very expensive. The better question is what's your budget exactly?
Edit: Actually, nevermind. Reading more reviews, that air cooler I linked seems to be more intentioned for large contact area CPUs like threadripper. There are high end, consumer oriented air coolers, like the Noctua NH-D15 that would be better for going air.
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lol so which is it? bottom of the barrel mobo or crazy expensive? you keep flip flopping around here lol
I'm thinking the B650E Taichi lite is likely the best bang for the buck AM5 mobo available
StoleMyOwnCar
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I'm "flip flopping" because:
1. I feel like the B650Es are too high priced to really be budget (and many don't even use the featureset that chipset is given, probably)
2. The X670E takes a lot of splurging before the motherboards under it actually use the features of the chipset.
Hence, logically, my opinion is that the only thing worth it under the umbrella is either going very cheap and gambling on the next gen of the chipset having more reasonable prices, or splurging on a higher end X670E (like the one I bought) and being done with it for hopefully the rest of the next gen. Sorry if that got lost in translation. That's just my opinion on this gen.
pendragon1
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thats because its the midrange
StoleMyOwnCar
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I sort of conflate the two in my head. I guess I'm used to "midrange" offering more than this, for the price. B650E starts at ~$250, and some B650E motherboards are well over $300. The chipset is hard capped to 4 SATA slots and less PCIE lanes (and assuming those remaining lanes are even being used). My older X570S Mag Carbon was purchased for $320. As I understand it from Buildzoid, the issue appears to be the PCIE5. PCIE5 is apparently really expensive to implement.
It has me wondering if PCIE5 will be cheaper to implement as tech advances a bit, so newer high end motherboards down the line might end up cheaper. That's pretty much why I would personally do (or would have done rather) either B650M and then rebuild later (which OP does not want to do) or just take the plunge and do mid-high end X670E, if aiming to attempt to use the motherboard throughout multiple CPU gens. The middle point is just lackluster while still being expensive. But that's just my opinion.
It has me wondering if PCIE5 will be cheaper to implement as tech advances a bit, so newer high end motherboards down the line might end up cheaper. That's pretty much why I would personally do (or would have done rather) either B650M and then rebuild later (which OP does not want to do) or just take the plunge and do mid-high end X670E, if aiming to attempt to use the motherboard throughout multiple CPU gens. The middle point is just lackluster while still being expensive. But that's just my opinion.
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Agree here. I got an ASUS x670E board, and I'm pissed that there are only 4 SATA slots and only 3 adapter slots.
Plus I don't need 5 NVMe drive slots. 2 or 3 max is what I would prefer. So it seems that I "should have" gotten a Threadripper board and CPU.
riev90
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Wow that honestly is one heck of a deal.
I'm using that board (HDV), still waiting Ryzen 7500F that's still on the way to my place.
I've flashed the 1.24 bios (AGESA 1.0.0.7) that supported 7500F by using the bios flashback feature, the feature that's missed by many X570 / B550 boards of AM4 .
And at the price I purchased last month, this board beat the high-end X570 board feature set.
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StoleMyOwnCar
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You'll be happy with it. As I read more and more about motherboard features by looking through manuals and whatnot (I've continued doing some research even after buying my open box X670E Carbon), I'm basically realizing that there doesn't seem to be any real reason for B650E (or arguably budget level X670E) to exist right now.
Here is a cheap $120 Asrock B650 motherboard:
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/FcbRsY/asrock-b650m-pro-rs-micro-atx-am5-motherboard-b650m-pro-rs
It has 4 sata ports, 3 NVME (one of which is X4 5.0 from the CPU...?, although I'm kind of confused about that after looking at its block diagram... but either way it's all you really need for game load times) slots... and 1 4.0 PCIE X16 slot. The manual doesn't seem to note any of these slots sharing bandwidth.
Considering even a 4090 has trouble saturating a PCIE 3.0 X16 slot (outside of Warhammer which is likely simply a driver issue):
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2SuyiHs-O4
What use is there in PCIE X16 5.0 for likely the next 2-4+ years? The 5090 would have to use more than twice as much bandwidth as the 4090 to actually actually begin needing PCIE 5.0, and is about 1-1.5 years away at the least. Its successor (which might need this bandwidth) will then be at least 4 years away from now. By then, you might want to upgrade simply due to some new tech that releases. That's nearly half a decade. This B650, for $120, basically provides, near as I can tell, ~%90+ of the current (and near future) functional capability of a B650E chipset (and arguably 90%+ for budget X670E, which often have 4 sata slots anyway...), for <%50 of the cost. Main weakness is maybe rear I/O, but you can fix that with a USB hub if needed. Assuming the next 8800X3D chip doesn't use a drastic amount more power (like more than 7950X), that won't change, either. It will be viable for at least one more generation.
For X670E, you only really start getting into actual X670E chipset features (on the board models themselves; correct me if I'm wrong) above ~ $420-500, as far as I can tell. AMD created this weird, "You're either splurging or you're going budget" dichotamy, as far as I'm concerned. If I didn't get a good deal on this board, I would have likely gone B650 (non-E) at some point, full stop. Which is why my advice is as it is, to the topic poster.
I won't defend the price, but I've got an MSI MEG X670E ACE and it's been good. I did a lot of research comparing x670E boards before buying and this one came out on top. Notably, many of the motherboards made compromises in the wiring of PCIe slots and other components, where certain slots offered lower performance, or nvme drives in certain slots meant you couldn't use a PCIe card because lanes are shared, that sort of thing. The MSI board didn't have these limitations and really stood out in that way. I also liked the 10 Gbit ethernet.
That said, the price is stupid and I'm sure there are better values. But if you have money to spend and don't want to think that much about it you may want to consider it, the quality is good.
See at 44:45
View: https://youtu.be/lTBnzUF6EbE?si=jUKGEDFBPgx4A400
That said, the price is stupid and I'm sure there are better values. But if you have money to spend and don't want to think that much about it you may want to consider it, the quality is good.
See at 44:45
View: https://youtu.be/lTBnzUF6EbE?si=jUKGEDFBPgx4A400
StoleMyOwnCar
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That's the problem with X670E. Basically there's an upsell to unlock various features at every pricing tier up until that $700 board you bought... so "technically" you can justify the price for jumping to any of them... because all of the companies decided to be scumbags and lock incremental features behind paywalls. For me, the Carbon contains all of the useful features of the ACE (and X670E in general) that I would care about. Both have 6 SATA ports and I believe about the same amount of NVME slots on the board. The addon NVME thing I kind of view as a bit of a gimmick (and arguably 10Gbps port is as well... nothing can really use that unless you're running a full NAS off of it, and if you were you would be better off using Linux on it...), so I think the main reason to purchase it is for the external clock gen, if you wanted to overclock. But you'd kind of need a golden chip to do that. I'm satisfied with the Carbon's lane allocation.
Well, again, I can't even justify the Carbon tbh lol. The only reason I upgraded was because I got my Carbon for $200 open box. It's crazy how to get most of the features of a chipset, you have to spend THAT much. It's over a 1.5x uptick from last gen...
Edit: Actually uh... one weird point. Carbon apparently has two 5.0 M2 slots as opposed to the ACE's 1 slot...
I guess it doesn't matter because most people would only be running 1 5.0 drive but uh... just something weird that I found the ACE as a downgrade on. I'm guessing it's because the ACE decided to relocate that lane somewhere else? Hmm.
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Dopamin3
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Shoutout to MSI for still providing block diagrams, sometimes they aren't included in manuals anymore. Spoiler: it's the Aquantia 10GbE NIC
StoleMyOwnCar
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Actually I think all they did was relocate that lane to the third X16 slot on the motherboard? On the Carbon, it's just an X4 Gen 4 slot. On the ACE it's a Gen 5... at X4. The 10Gbps just seems to be coming from the chipset?
That last X16 (X4) slot on the ACE also apparently shares bandwidth with the 20Gbps Type C usb port... which is going to cause all kind of weirdness (maybe? someone correct me if I'm wrong) if you decide to actually use that 20Gbps port at full throttle while also trying to use that X4 port? A point of interest is that they advertise it as being able to put a GPU in there. Theoretically speaking, an X4 5.0 gen port should be the same bandwidth as an x16 3.0 port (which is fine for a 4090)... but since it's Gen 5 and a 4090 is gen 4, wouldn't the 4090 just be running at X4 Gen 4? I had a discussion about that with someone. I have no idea, just something weird to point out.
After looking at both block diagrams... I think the ACE is a bit of a mess of bandwidth sharing now. I prefer the Carbon's layout. Notice that they also had to resort to an asm1061 controller instead of native, for 2 of the SATA ports on the ACE. AFAIK, non-native SATA ports get worse performance than native ones. The Carbon board doesn't seem to have bandwidth sharing going on basically anywhere except the top two 5.0 X16 slots, and all of the SATA ports are native from the chipset.
Obviously this is just nitpicking, but I think nitpicking is important when the board costs more than the CPU. I think this reinforces what Buildzoid (or maybe it was someone else) said. You only go X670E if you have a SPECIFIC PURPOSE in mind for the EXACT features you want from a SPECIFIC X670E board. While the Carbon has great I/O and allocation, its normal asking price is still 470 freaking dollars (and, again, has no clockgen, as Buildzoid points out, if you wanted to do hardcore overclocking).
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUjUKKXRiFk
After watching this video I guess I don't really need to worry about if the mobo has an ECLK generator. That feature was a big reason why I was seriously considering the Taichi B650E. I should have nabbed the Taichi lite the other day but its now back ordered on newegg. Freaking nuts that "midrange" AM5 mobos are in the mid to high 300s. ugh....
Ended up ordering the parts for this build just a few minutes ago: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Q9frVW
decided to not spend the $$$ on a PCIE gen 5 drive and got 2 of the 2TB WD SN850x drives. I'll get a gen5 nvme drive when I do a mid cycle upgrade on the machine. For the mobo I decided that the Tomahawk X670E at $300 was the way to go vs the Taichi B650E so that I would have additional PCIE lanes if needed later on. Now I gotta figure out where to get a windows 11 license lol
LigTasm
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Looks like a nice build, its gonna be a big upgrade. Make sure you update the BIOS, the latest 1.0.0.7c AGESA has some good performance boosts. I'm able to run my 7200mhz kit on EXPO now where before it would only run up to 6400mhz.
pendragon1
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do you have, or have access to any oem systems with a windows 7 sticker on them? if so, you can feed 11 that key during install and it will work.
Not with stickers nor windows 7 I may have an old key saved in an email I'll have to look
Noice! Also nice to keep ssds in the same family. You’ll use just one app to manage them.
Enjoy the build!
Got mine from Kinguin.net. Never had an issue for years with games or software.
StoleMyOwnCar
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No particular concerns. Good PSU choice, and you did decide to scale down on the CPU cooler.
The Tomahawk is kind of a weird motherboard. Technically it's not really leveraging many (if any) X670E features. It's kind of like a B650E board. But the cheapest you would find a B650E motherboard with 4 NVME slots is $350 lol. So it's kind of like a higher end B650E motherboard that's tagged as X670E. Doesn't seem to be anything particularly concerning about it, though. Just be careful with this BIOS update, maybe?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/12yq4yb/megathread_for_am5_ryzen_7000/juy8g4w/
Yeah after you pointed out that PA SE 120 and I read some other reviews, that saved me around $125 or so and will likely cool as well as the AIO I was looking at. Thanks for the assist. I'll post up some photos of the build here once parts start coming in over the coming week. I'm stoked about the NZXT H9 Flow case.
for the Tomahawk, yeah It wasn't even a board I was originally considering until I saw that it was onsale for $299. Since the B650E Taichi lite was sold out, I was considering the 670E Steel Legend but I liked that the Tomahawk's VRMs were rated 20 amps higher and a couple of other features I wanted. I fully agree that it was stupid that AMD just had to have 4 different chipsets making things stupid confusing and difficult with picking out a board. I really wanted to wait for the next gen stuff but between Starfield and BG3 issues and Cyberpunk DLC coming out soon I knew that my 6700k just couldn't cut it anymore.
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lo the other thing I realized was that I ordered dang XMP memory instead of EXPO memory. I'm gonna keep fingers crossed that if EXPO doesnt recognize it, that I can just manually input the timings in the bios without issues. Apparantly Ripjaws is for XMP and Fury is for EXPO
KickAssCop
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Tomahawk is the one I ended up with also because I wanted 4 M2 slots and B650 Taichi was 50 bucks higher. I also get PCIe 5 for graphics just in case.
Let’s hope the damn parts come today.
Let’s hope the damn parts come today.
StoleMyOwnCar
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From what I googled, I think you'll be fine. Should be interchangeable? My ram sticks aren't particularly AMD Expo, but they've been working fine and have their XMP settings in my bios regardless.
riev90
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no need to worry about that.
if you get MSI board, then it had a chance to have Memory Try IT! feature.
That feature will come in handy as you can choose many combination of DRAM freq and timings.
KickAssCop
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Btw I looked up differences between Carbon and Tomahawk and it seems Carbon only has 3 meaningful things
1) 2 X PCIe 5.0 including extra for M2 support
2) Realtek 4080 codec (instead of 1200 on Tomahawk)
3) Some extra power phases
Everything else just depends on usage like extra SATA, extra USB etc. Saving about 170 bucks + tax for only meaningful thing for me (sound card) was a better deal. My old Tomahawk also had the 1200 so no problems there. Overclocking on AMD is anyways meh, power phases on Tomahawk are better than competition at same price and extra PCIe 5.0 slot was worthless for me. For M2 I am OK with 1 PCIe 5.0 M2 even though I will load up 3 Gen 4 and 1 Gen 3 drives.
1) 2 X PCIe 5.0 including extra for M2 support
2) Realtek 4080 codec (instead of 1200 on Tomahawk)
3) Some extra power phases
Everything else just depends on usage like extra SATA, extra USB etc. Saving about 170 bucks + tax for only meaningful thing for me (sound card) was a better deal. My old Tomahawk also had the 1200 so no problems there. Overclocking on AMD is anyways meh, power phases on Tomahawk are better than competition at same price and extra PCIe 5.0 slot was worthless for me. For M2 I am OK with 1 PCIe 5.0 M2 even though I will load up 3 Gen 4 and 1 Gen 3 drives.
StoleMyOwnCar
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What you listed depends on usage, too, though. Any meaningful difference between boards depends on what use the person has for the features, if any. Again, I believe many of the features beyond what a barebones B650 chipset provides at a ~$120 price point would be useless for a large majority of people.
To bullet point it a bit:
- B650->B650E: Gain PCIE5.0 X16. For twice the price of B650. You can't really leverage it for years. B650 has cheap budget boards with 1 5.0 NVME slot. Actually the 120$ one I linked has it. All of them have 4 SATA ports as well. B650E might have better VRMs just because it's more expensive, but iirc Buildzoid said that even the cheapest B650 could even overclock a 7950X a bit with their VRMs.
- B650E-X670E: You gain more PCIE lanes and SATA ports.
Heck this one has 6 SATA ports, too:
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/fCGbt6/asrock-x670e-pro-rs-atx-am5-motherboard-x670e-pro-rs
It's Asrock though. MSI is generally more reliable.
My 6700k has lasted 8 years (I ordered the parts for it on 9/15/2015) and I wouldn't even build a new system for it if I could stick 9900k in it and get another 2-3 years out of it. I read about the coffee time mod (getting 8xxx and 9xxx Intels to run on Z170 mobos) but my days of modding CPUs and hacking a bios are long past. I'm hopeful that the X670E Tomahawk, with a few GPU upgrades and whatever the last CPU released for the AM5 socket will get me at least 8 years or possibly 10. That is the main reason why I didn't go for cheap mobo. I really wanted to wit for the 2nd gen AM5 chipsets but the last couple of games I have played, my 6700k even at 4.8Ghz, is really showing its age.