Motherboard insecurity… Keep current B450 or buy new B550

[Ertman]

Hi, 

 

I feel a bit dumb asking this question. Would the B550 be worth upgrading to?
 

I had purchased a B450 this year and is currently paired with a 5600x. I am aware that the B550 existed at the time of purchase and thought to myself I will probably not need those features. However since then I have considered some of the previous Gen crippled (limited lanes) GPUs and am unsure if direct storage will every be much of a thing in the next few years. As you’d an see this mainly an issue with PCIe 4 vs 3 bandwidth.

 

This would not be much a tiered upgrade, just not sure if those features will end up mattering down the road. I guess this this might actually be a discussion of future proofing and It’s not exactly like I know I will need those features or not. I don’t tend to buy the higher end gpus, so the pcie restricted GPUs could be more of a concern.

[Blue4130]

8 minutes ago, Ertman said:

Hi, 

 

I feel a bit dumb asking this question. Would the B550 be worth upgrading to?
 

I had purchased a B450 this year and is currently paired with a 5600x. I am aware that the B550 existed at the time of purchase and thought to myself I will probably not need those features. However since then I have considered some of the previous Gen crippled (limited lanes) GPUs and am unsure if direct storage will every be much of a thing in the next few years. As you’d an see this mainly an issue with PCIe 4 vs 3 bandwidth.

 

This would not be much a tiered upgrade, just not sure if those features will end up mattering down the road. I guess this this might actually be a discussion of future proofing and It’s not exactly like I know I will need those features or not. I don’t tend to buy the higher end gpus, so the pcie restricted GPUs could be more of a concern.

I would not buy it until I had an actual need for it. It will still be around in the future. Who knows, you may switch platforms completely before you get a gpu that needs Pci-e 4.0 

[h0m3]

35 minutes ago, Ertman said:

Hi, 

 

I feel a bit dumb asking this question. Would the B550 be worth upgrading to?
 

I had purchased a B450 this year and is currently paired with a 5600x. I am aware that the B550 existed at the time of purchase and thought to myself I will probably not need those features. However since then I have considered some of the previous Gen crippled (limited lanes) GPUs and am unsure if direct storage will every be much of a thing in the next few years. As you’d an see this mainly an issue with PCIe 4 vs 3 bandwidth.

 

This would not be much a tiered upgrade, just not sure if those features will end up mattering down the road. I guess this this might actually be a discussion of future proofing and It’s not exactly like I know I will need those features or not. I don’t tend to buy the higher end gpus, so the pcie restricted GPUs could be more of a concern.

Honestly, unless you're wanna put a RTX 4090 on it or a ultra fast SSD for content production dont worry, at all.

TL;DR;

I have a RTX 3080 and a RTX 2060 on a Asus X570, and they both run at x8 speeds, that means that my RTX 3080 runs at the speed of your PCI-E gen 3.0 x16 slot since PCI-E speeds doubles every generation, with little to no performance loss whatsoever. Unless you're running a AMD Ryzen with integrated graphics that will halve your PCI bandwidth (to x8) plus a high end RTX 4000 series or RX 7000 series or you have a crazy setup like mine.

Also, DirectStorage is something that is talked sometimes but not close to become reality, we dont have any game on PC that leverage that technology or that is planning to implement it on the future, actually we dont even have the technology implemented on PCs. So I wouldn't worry that the next few years we would have lots of games running on it. I have friends running games on spinning rust and myself have games stored on SATA SSDs... Forcing everybody to buy new motherboards + extremelly fast SSDs for game storage overnight wont be a thing. A SSD that can handle PCI-E Gen 4 speeds + has at least 1TB to store games is very expensive compared to your run of the mil SATA SSD and not in the same world as a 1TB HDD. I would wager that it would take a long time before DirectStorage became a thing, we first need to have affordable storage that is fast enough and today those kinds of speeds are a niche.

Sony and Microsoft can do that on consoles because they have one kind of SSD on their systems, on the Xbox you have to buy the proprietary expansion card and on Sony side only specific NVMe SSDs can be used. But as you can see the storage on those systems is pretty small for today standard, with the expansion card that costs another console you can only have 3TB (1TB + 2TB) on the Xbox and even less on the PS since you cannot run modern games on external storage. We have SATA SSDs with more than 30x that size on PC and the possibility to have more than 10 drives on a single consumer system.

GamersNexus did a video about this exact issue with a RTX 3080 and some difference sits in the single digit FPS but on most titles the difference is margin of error:

 

You can actually run a RTX 2080 Ti, the top of the line for the RTX 2000 series or a RTX 3070 (they are basically the same card) on a PCI-E 2.0 x16 or on a PCI-E 3.0 x8 and expect at most 3% of performance difference. We are talking about half your MB speeds... https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-pci-express-scaling/

If you run a last gen top tier card, yeah, you maybe get 1% more performance, i dont think its worth it. Anything lower wont benefit at all. About storage? Without direct storage the only benefit in going faster is loading times, linus did a blind test on it aswell and some people even tought that SATA was the fastest one...

 

[Thomas4]

With all of the changes in the current situation, it's almost at the point where even three years down the line is the far future. The only thing that's is almost a guarantee is the case and even THAT is not a promise, IF you're a competitive gamer running AAA games.

The rest of us can get along on some faily old hardware and you'll be surprised at the top tier companies running WinXP here in late 2022.

[Mark Kaine]

no, that kind of upgrade makes no sense unless you have really crappy vrms or something. 

[Ertman]

Alright, thank you all for your input, it is appreciated.

 

 

[Ertman]

20 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

I would not buy it until I had an actual need for it. It will still be around in the future. Who knows, you may switch platforms completely before you get a gpu that needs Pci-e 4.0 

Fair enough.

 

My concern was that some of the low to mid range gpus would be using x8 PCIe and trying to get a board couple years down the road could end up being prohibitively expensive making a switch to a new platform a better value.

 

There’s less of a concern with direct storage, but leaving possible performance on the table. The difference with the two issues is direct storage is something that COULD be implemented, but may not, while those GPUs already exist.

[Rysters Tech]

Keep the B450. It doesn't make sense to buy a new motherboard when it's the end of the line for AM4. I just installed a 5600 in a ASRock A320M Motherboard and it works perfectly with only a bios update.

[Blue4130]

3 hours ago, Ertman said:

Fair enough.

 

My concern was that some of the low to mid range gpus would be using x8 PCIe and trying to get a board couple years down the road could end up being prohibitively expensive making a switch to a new platform a better value.

 

There’s less of a concern with direct storage, but leaving possible performance on the table. The difference with the two issues is direct storage is something that COULD be implemented, but may not, while those GPUs already exist.

But you don't have those gpu's... If you don't have those gpu's then you don't need to worry. AM4 is over, don't dump any more $ on it if you already have a working system.