Looking for affordable AM4 motherboard that supports 5000 series Ryzen and at least pci-gen 4

[WackySpace]

Country: South Africa Currency: Rand Budget: 1500-2000

 

I am looking to upgrade to an AMD motherboard in the future since AMD CPUs are cheaper in the 6-core range which I am aiming for, but most of the motherboards I find only support up to Ryzen 3000 series and PCI-gen 3 in the price range provided. I even have a good air cooler that fits AMD processors also, so I can save on a cooler.

 

However, I found an MSI Pro H610M-E DDR4 Intel LGA 1700, that does support from 12th gen to 14th gen and even has pci-gen 4 at the price of 1800. So, If I can't find an AM4 equivalent that can support 5000 series Ryzen processors, I'm looking to stick to Intel. Or are AMD processors cheap, but the motherboards are expensive?

 

Is it worth it to move to AMD motherboards?

[Eigenvektor]

For official support you'll need to look for B550 motherboards, though many B450 should also support Zen 3 with a BIOS update.

 

(There's also X470/X570 but they are more pricey)

 

B550 generally supports PCIe 4.0 for GPU and one NVMe drive.

[WackySpace]

17 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

For official support you'll need to look for B550 motherboards, though many B450 should also support Zen 3 with a BIOS update.

 

(There's also X470/X570 but they are more pricey)

 

B550 generally supports PCIe 4.0 for GPU and one NVMe drive.

Is it unlikely that a b450 would have pci-gen 4? And what about this one, it supports the CPU, but it has gen 3 pci, so I would have to use a gen 3 card or use a gen 4 card on a slower speed. I'm looking to get a ryzen 5 5600g

 

PRIME A520M-K - Tech Specs｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global

[Eigenvektor]

15 minutes ago, WackySpace said:

Is it unlikely that a b450 would have pci-gen 4?

I think some do, but officially you need B550 for PCIe 4.0.

 

PCIe is backwards and forwards compatible, so any PCIe 4.0 GPU will generally work in a PCIe 3.0 slot. For most GPUs there's very little to no performance loss. The major exceptions are low end cards like the AMD RX 6400 and 6500 XT. Higher end cards with more on-board VRAM on the other hand don't really need or benefit from PCIe 4.0 (see RX 6600 XT or RTX 4090).

 

For storage PCIe 4.0 makes a measurable difference, but in practical every day usage you often don't notice the difference between a PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 NVMe. I have both in my system and moving games to the PCIe 4.0 drive did basically nothing for almost every game in terms of load times. It's only really noticeable when copying large files to another drive that's equally fast.

 

26 minutes ago, WackySpace said:

I'm looking to get a ryzen 5 5600g

Note that the 5600G does not support PCIe 4.0. So even if your motherboard technically supports PCIe 4.0, you'd be limited to PCIe 3.0 with that CPU.

[WackySpace]

I think I'll stick with PCI gen 3, there's plenty of decent gpu's, and the ryzen 5 5600g, if I do buy a gen 4 gpu it will just have to run a bit slower until I can upgrade again. I'm first going to get the mb, cpu etc and the gpu last since the cpu has onboard graphics. So which mb must I get that supports this cpu without a bios update. The b450 or the a520m?  I don't really mind a 1080p gaming pc.

[Supersonicwolfe]

9 hours ago, WackySpace said:

I think I'll stick with PCI gen 3, there's plenty of decent gpu's, and the ryzen 5 5600g, if I do buy a gen 4 gpu it will just have to run a bit slower until I can upgrade again. I'm first going to get the mb, cpu etc and the gpu last since the cpu has onboard graphics. So which mb must I get that supports this cpu without a bios update. The b450 or the a520m?  I don't really mind a 1080p gaming pc.

You don't need to worry about PCIe gen 3, unless you encouter a GPU with x8 lanes (7500XT for example)

[WackySpace]

I decided not to go over to AMD, MSI Pro H610M-E DDR4 Intel LGA 1700 has PCI-e gen 4 looks like a good investment for the future, then I won't have to upgrade for a long while, and I decided to get a 6 core i5. It even has windows 11 support which I am iffy about with the lack of privacy, so I might just use Linux and disable secure boot etc. What do you think?

 

I am confused because the online shop I checked the specs of this motherboard and it is DDR4 up to 3200, but on the MSI website it says DDR5. I know some boards can support both but the specs don't mention this.

Edited October 29, 2023 by WackySpace