Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Checking Out the MSI B650M Mortar: Is Losing PCIe 5 a Big Deal on AM5?”.
Ah, the sky is falling with am5 everything is on fire. Ah, no, no! No! No! No! We’Re here to look at the MSI mag b650m mortar Wi-Fi! This is one of the more affordable b650m motherboards. This is not pcie5! That’S what you give up, but a lot of people said am5, it’s a platform is just too expensive: the prices have been ratcheted up, everything is more, and while am5 is a new platform, it is not the value platform. Yet the value platform from AMD right now is am4. That’S sort of where we are am5 is still kind of a premium, even if you’re going to get a motherboard like the b650m motor Wi-Fi, which has more USB and more pcie connectivity than even some of the desktop boards that we see for am5.
We’Re going to take a deep look at that motherboard, but I’m also going to ramble on a little bit about the General State of am5 and some other fun interesting things to watch out for including ssds that are coming up for the whole pcie E5 conversation that’ll, Be in separate reviews, but let’s Dive In. Thank you. Let’S start by taking a closer look at our motherboard. So this is a Micro, ATX motherboard, but you wouldn’t know it. If you just read the specifications, there’s really very very little in the Box, it’s the motherboard and a couple SATA antennas and unnecessarily cheap Wi-Fi antennas, European regulatory notices, an m.2 screw, I’m sorry an m.2 retention clip which is tools which is very nice. A quick installation guide and some stickers with lucky: oh yeah, MSI! Congratulations! It’S! You know their 30th Anniversary kind of thing, so Micro ATX motherboard. But if we check out the connectivity on our Micro, ATX, motherboard, there’s kind of a lot of pcie, DisplayPort, HDMI and everything else and and we’re doing pretty good in terms of our m.2 connectivity. But everything here, it’s PCI Express four, not five.
That’S what you give up with this motherboard now it still has four ddr5 dim slots, and that is the surface mount ddr5, so you’ll be able to run ddr5 at some pretty reasonable speeds. We’Ve also got a good enough vrm here in order to be able to run our ryzen 9 7950x. Now the layout here for the pcie is pretty intelligent. Your m92s are connected directly to the CPU again just limited to PC Express 4.0, the bottom physical slot.
It’S a physical x16, but it’s X4 electrical that’s connected through the chipset, but it does run a PC Express 4.0 as well and then our PCI Express by one also through the chipset at the rear. I o we have our bios flash button. This will let you flash a bios from a USB stick, which is important, because this new CPUs could come out of the motherboard, not support it if you’re building a system and it’s dead and it won’t turn on and you’ve waited the requisite. You know ddr5 training time a couple of minutes.
You may just need to update your bios, so there’s instructions for that on the MSI website. Basically, you make a special flash drive, put it in a special USB port hit the button, and even without a working CPU or even with an unknown CPU. The platform can take the file on the flash drive and Flash it to the BIOS and then you’ll be able to boot. Your new CPU or you know, reset your bios or re-upgrade, your bios or whatever, whatever you need to do in order to get your system to boot, we’ve got DisplayPort and HDMI out.
We’Ve got a 2.5 gigabit Lan that is based around the Realtek 8125 BG 2.5. Gigabit Lan chipset we’ve got two USB 3.2 Gen 2 type, A those are 10 gigabit ports. Just below that, then we’ve got a type A and A type c, which is 20 gigabit. Then next to that, we’ve got four five gigabit ports. Those are the blue ones, and then we have two Wi-Fi ports for our Wi-Fi. 6E Solutions is a six gigahertz solution.
This is an AMD Wi-Fi 6E solution. This is one of the first that we’ve seen in the market got AMD your Wi-Fi chipset yeah. Okay, I mean you know, but it’s nice to see that then we have our eight channel 7.1 HD audio with audio boost, and this is a true 7.1 Channel output. Unlike some of the other motherboards that we’ve seen on the am5 platform that just have a couple of analog audio output ports, this has your traditional analog 7.1 at the rear. I o.
So if you’ve got a really old, you know there’s a lot of people in The Forum that have those ancient Logitech computer speaker sets that had the 7.1 analog. I still got a set of those myself. I really like them, I’m gon na recap: it it’s their! The capacitors are hitting their age you’re going to have to have, to recap those, but we’ve got an analog audio solution. Then that works out pretty well for you, although you could just use spdif or a USB add-in card or whatever, depending on what your audio requirements are. So even though this is a Micro ATX, motherboard does pack in some pretty spectacular other IO for a Micro ATX.
Six, the SATA 6 Cubit per second Port Said a 30 pin right angle, USB 5 gigabit connector, a type c connector, that’s well above the GPU. Then of course you’ve got your 24 pin ATX power along with dual 8-pin power for the CPU. Now the motherboard on here is rated for ddr5 OC up to 6400, given the ddr5 6000 sweet spot of am5, that’s probably going to work out pretty good unless future CPUs are able to do even higher memory clocks. So maybe that’s another vote in favor of I’m. Just going to save a few bucks on motherboard I’ll get another motherboard later, when the next generation of am5 is out something like that, it’s not a not a bad strategy, and what do you really give up with pcie5? We are starting to see a couple of pcie E5 m.2 hit the market. However, if we look at what are currently class leading performance, m.2 they’re pretty much all PCI Express 4. now optane. Of course, it’s on the way out, that’s dead, that doesn’t really count.
But if we look at you know the Samsung 990 Pro that is pcie, four, not five, and the reason that that SSD feels so fast is not because it can do the raw throughput. You know 10 gigabytes per second, it’s because it has very low. I o latency and that’s really important, to make your computer.
You know, feel Snappy and feel responsive. Another SSD to watch is a solidine p44 they’ve done a tremendous amount of work around the software stack in order to optimize what the drive is doing with various interaction with different operating systems. So I have some reviews of those upcoming.
The 990 is not generally available, yet the p44 is getting ready to be available. I’Ve also got a mushkin Vortex. There are some other. This is a two terabyte model. There are some other lower cost options that have some pretty reasonable performance, but again everything across the board is pretty much PCI Express 4.. I am watching and hoping that PCI Express 5 implements some of these same software optimization, so you can have the best of both worlds, fast transfer rate plus everything else, but I have a feeling that pcie5’s time to shine is really probably going to be in direct Storage – and maybe it won’t make that much of a difference over PCI Express 4, but that’s a that’s a ramble for another time.
Let’S get this thing in a system and get it tested now rounding out our build for most of the testing. I used g-skill trotting Z5. This is a neocat ddr56000. It has the Expo profile if you’re not read in on that, you should check out our coverage of the am5 platform. There’S a lot you can learn. I mean aim5 is a new platform. There’S a lot of new cool different stuff, but, like XMP, helps you overclock memory Expo helps you overhawk memory on an AMD platform, so you look for an expo memory kit, like the G skill, Trident Z, kit and it’ll work out pretty well. If you want to run it at ddr56000 now, as always, if you do a build like this, the first thing that you’re going to want to do is update your bios, even if it boots and everything seems like it’s.
Okay, updating the BIOS is going to bring quality of life and stability improvements generally across the board. Now this platform, am5, is actually pretty cool because pretty much any am5 motherboard will be able to run any am5 CPU, including our absolutely monstrous 7950x. This is a 16 core CPU and I was able to cool it on this motherboard or there knocked to a you know: dual af-12 Tower cooler here. This is not even as beefy as like the nhd-15 and it doesn’t really throttle the whole 95 degrees C hot spot with am5 that was kind of overblown. It’S sort of designed to work like that in the hot spot for 95c super tiny, I’m starting to learn that I’m starting to get clued in on that as we do more testing, it’s not a throttle point. It’S a set point: there’s no throttling! That’S actually occurring when it’s 95 degrees C, that’s just what it’s targeting for maximum performance assuming to the power and everything else is there. This is another board that I would pair, probably with the 7700x or the 7900x, these the 8 or the 12 core.
A 7600x is a little bit more challenging. So there’s nothing. You can run the 7600 on this motherboard.
That’S no problem! It’S only six cores! It’S just that! You probably want the 7700. It’S only 100 bucks more right. Now, there’s probably going to be some pricing adjustments. So, the time that I’m shooting this uh, you know we’re talking October 23rd um, the launch pricing and your local availability may be different for am5, just because of competition in the marketplace and everything else. But this is not a motherboard, that’s 500, or a thousand dollars or twelve hundred dollars. This is a reasonable motherboard for am5, among all of the other choices for am5.
That said, there is one thing that I wish they would have done differently, and that is the top pcie slot is not located as high as it could be. Typically, in an in a Micro ATX case, you’ve only got four slots to work with at the back, and so with this pcie placement. The primary slot is actually down one and because of that, if you’ve got a triple slot, GPU you’ll never be able to use any of these pcie slots in an ideal world. It would be right under the CPU it’d be right here, but they would probably have to relocate the m.2.
You might be nice to have a third m.do slot as well, but if you’ve got a two slot GPU, you could theoretically use the bottom pcie slot, but in this configuration that’s a little more challenging now, let’s talk off label uses. If you want to use this motherboard for like a Home Server type application, this actually could make a lot of sense. You got DisplayPort and HDMI out. All of these am5 CPUs have a built-in igpu, so you’re gon na be able to run three peripherals here and be able to do whatever you want to do.
If you want to add a second Nick, including an Intel i-225v check out our uh, you know Home Server, pcie cheat codes because you can actually add those in Via m.2 module. That’S off label! Nobody! Really! Nobody really intended to be able to use m.2 slots for peripherals like networking, but there are two and a half and even 10 gig network cards that will fit in an m.2 slot and if you’ve got two m.2 slots here to work with, you take your x16 Slot break that into four m.2 slots and then use your m.2 for other peripherals and get real creative and those Zenfone more cores for home servers and virtualization, probably are the best choice for things that are available right now, because you don’t have to juggle. You know multiple different core types: if you’re running a virtualization platform, which the support for that on Linux is the best, but still has a little ways to go.
Now. Msi has a number of really unique bios features, and I have to call out memory. Try it and beta Runner these features in the world of am5, where things are a little bit. Uh up in the air right now are hugely hugely beneficial, so I put in a non-expo kit just to experiment and memory. Try it. Let me basically one try get this kit of memory up and running now. This is ddr5 6600 kit.
I actually want to run it at six thousand, not sixty six hundred memory. Triad has a menu that has a whole bunch of different memory options in it that have tighter timings as well as six thousand you see. If you tune the memory, you might be able to get better timings than you would, if you just lower it from 6600 to 6000.. So you can make up the performance like you’re, not really leaving any performance on the table.
If you improve the timings from 6600 to 6000, you get what I’m saying: memory, try it and beta Runner makes it easy to do that without absolutely breaking your system, and if you do break your system well, the BIOS flashback thing is there to go. Oh and jbat one at the bottom, it’s a two pin jumper that’ll. Let you clear the CMOS in case you really really screw up or just take all the dims out, but one and usually that’s enough to make the system wake up and say: oh I’ve got to retrain the memory, do whatever and get you back into BIOS, but Msi’S got some unique features in their bios other than just that. I really do like the way that they do their bios and with the ddr5 am5 platform being as new as it is.
Those features which have been there since time immemorial are even more handy now than they’ve ever been it’s a pretty nice little board. It also has some pretty cool features that are built into the bios, so check that out, I’m Wendell. This is level one. I’M signing out and you’ll find me in the level one forums .