Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “X670 and B650E Aorus Motherboard Review”.
Oh my gosh, just what is up with these motherboard costs am5 has launched. You can get 16 cores and monster single core performance monster, multi-core performance actually Best in Class multi-core performance for the whole platform, but the motherboard stuff has got people all turned upside down and discombobulated. I’M here to take a look at the x670 RS Elite ax and the b650 auris master from gigabyte both of these motherboards. I picked up locally, and these motherboards, I think, have the best am5 pcie layout that I’ve seen we’re going to talk about these two. We’Re also going to talk a little bit about the x670e auris master and why the am5 pricing maybe gets a bad rep.
Okay, so the x670e auris master that one a new egg, that’s like five or six hundred dollars or just you know, street price MSRP. It is a lot of money and if you look at the x670 Oracle ax or even the b650 Oris Master, but if we look at if we look at this one, this is a 289 motherboard at the time that I’m shooting this video. This is significantly less expensive and you really don’t give up a lot. This motherboard actually does have PCI Express 5 m.2 a lot of the time.
The non-em motherboards you probably already clued into that e is pci5, no ease no pc85. This is x670. There’S no e, but it still includes a PC Express 5 m.2, which are the only piece Express five devices that you can really get right now so you’re kind of buying the future and as it turns out most buyers, don’t really want to buy Pizza Express 5 Because of the increased cost, okay, here’s this motherboard, the 200 more expensive counterpart really doesn’t give you a lot else. If you side by side of these motherboards, I mean this is a 16 plus two plus two phase vrm and blah blah blah, and you know this is the aorus elite and the elite is historically a little bit lower end than the master.
It’S like, okay! Well, what about the b650e Oris Master instead of the x670e Oris Master? Again, this is a better choice. This is more expensive than the non-e, and this gives you PCI Express 5, a lot more PCI Express 5. As a matter of fact, two m.2s, plus your x16 slot for your GPU, which can then be split into X8 and two more PCI Express 5m.2.
This is one of the few motherboards that will give you four PCI Express 5 m.2 right on the board, although I don’t recommend AMD raid we’ll talk about that in a minute. This motherboard is only 349., so again still significantly less expensive than the pure PCI Express 5 counterpart. I don’t, I don’t think the x670e chipset is really bringing a lot to the value proposition category or even a something to get super excited about the way that a motherboard makers have it configured. That said, pcie slots, everybody wants more pcie slots. When we’ve got giant four slot gpus it’s hard to even access those pcie slots. They pretty much belong at the bottom of the motherboard. From a wiring standpoint. This is really challenging because you’re going to need redrivers or repeaters or something like that and that drives the board cost up. So both of these actually have two physical x16 slots at the bottom of the board.
Now one of them is by four electrical through the chipset PC Express 4.0 and the other one is PCI Express 3.0 by 2 through the chipset, which is actually more useful than it sounds like also. I think gigabytes design makes a little bit of lemonade from lemons. The lemons of pcie layout, that is in that they give you four m.2 slots on board that is kind of class, leading here.
Even our Plucky little x670 Oris Elite ax, the two of the m.2s go directly to the CPU they’re configured for PC Express 4.0. All right cool, that’s great, and then there are two more PCI Express 4.0 that go through the chipset. So you don’t give anything up here.
It’S always going to run at x16, whereas our b650e, if you use all four of them, you’re G GPU, is going to run at PCI, Express by eight it’s going to give up eight Lanes yeah. You also have to be a little bit careful if you do want to use all four m.2 slots on the x670 or it’s elite ax, because one of the m.2s will drop your uh pcie slot for your graphics down to X8. One goes through the chipset and the other two go directly into the CPU. It’S kind of an odd choice, but okay, both of these have 2.5 gigabit Lan. This is the Intel 2.5 gigabit solution. This is the Realtek 2.5 gigabit solution.
Both of them have 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6E, but it’s the AMD chipset, which is pretty good actually, as it turns out another one of these motherboards really tell you on the box what the ddr5 speed is, which I think is a little bit of a mistake. I was able to get ddr5 6400 running on our aorus master and ddr5 6200 running on our aorus Elite ax, and that could be down to the CPUs of the different configurations that I have. 6400 was almost stable, but not quite uh, with the rsle ax and again that may be down to the CPU.
The Sweet Spot for am5 CPUs is ddr5 6000, and that gives you the optimal ratios between your Infinity Fabric and your CPU internals and the actual memory. So you want to probably run ddr5 6000. I was using our g-skill, oh where’s, my box where’s, my juice scale box and for memory testing. We were using our GCL Trident Z5 Neo now in terms of power, delivery and everything like that. These motherboards are Overkill.
Even for the 16 chords, the 7950x, you aren’t going to have any trouble and you can even run a knock to a tower cooler with that 7950x. If you put a better cooler on it, you will get like one percent ish better performance, but this cooler was more than adequate. Even for the 7950x. Most of the heavy lifting of this power supply are the Dual AF fans that the one the 120 millimeter Nokia AF fans.
These are the newer style, nacho fans. They move a lot of air as a practical matter. It works well, a larger Tower. Cooler like the D15 will also work really well. I’Ve had good luck with some other Tower. Coolers um, it can be. The am5 platform can be a little sensitive to how your cooler is mounted, so make sure that you have adequate thermal paste and that coverage is good, especially where the hot spots are, which are your two chiplets. So keep that in mind. Both of these have a Realtek ALC, 1220 audio codec. However, this one also implements an ESS, saber audio DAC on our our b650e RS Master. It’S a nice touch. It’S a it’s a nice quality of life Improvement, however, both of them only have a limited analog out.
Selection at the rear, i o our aorus Elite ax has three analog ports and our aorus master has Optical spdif and two analog ports that you can use for. You know speakers microphone whatever it’s reconfigurable in software. You can use those in a combination of your front panel connections if you need more analog connectivity, but generally, this is enough for everybody. I don’t know why this generation has moved away so completely from 7.1 audio. I guess it’s just because everybody uses headphones now and they don’t have a 7.1 Headphone set you’re able to sort of do the surround sound thing directly in the audio like you can make it sound like somebody’s behind you just with two audio channels.
So I guess that makes sense now I should say that the PCI Express slot at the bottom. It’S only two lanes wide. It’S PCI Express 4.0 by two lanes on the b650e RS Master, but in the grand scheme of things I don’t think that really makes a huge difference now in terms of configurability and bios features and bios options, gigabyte really gives you a lot that you can tune And and tweak in the Bios, which is very nice, I also noticed that gigabyte has really amped up their software packages.
This time they have new RGB software and they have new fan control software. Unfortunately, I don’t recommend that you use it. It’S really not very good. You can control your fan profiles and your RGB directly from bios that works pretty well. The windows Control software, not super good, if you’re using Linux as a base – and you want to you – know – configure these for Linux. These can work pretty well with Linux.
Just keep in mind that your physical pcie slots come from the chipset not directly from the CPU. It’S if you’re doing the iommu, GPU passthrough thing it can be more useful because those direct CPU Lanes tend to automatically break out into iommu groups. You just have to turn Island mu on a couple other things in BIOS you’re good to go where these slots go through. The chipset you’ll probably be better off using ACS patch, but this may be something that we cover over on the level one Linux Channel.
With a little bit other different info now, let’s also talk for a second about the raid features. You can turn on AMD raid and I have done in the past videos on enabling amb raid. What do you want to do with Andy raid? You could do a RAID 0, a stripe to make your ssds go faster. You could do a raid one, you know for mirroring and redundancy you could do other configurations.
The reality is that the software and development on the AMD raid driver really hasn’t kept up with the state of the art, the with things like our mushkin Vortex, two terabyte SSD. You know this is a. This – is an affordable 2280 two terabyte SSD, it’s fast. It’S not the fastest, it’s not the slowest, but it’s really really fast. If you get a bunch of these, or even just two of these it’ll, be a little bit hamstrung in RAID Mode versus native Windows, 11 mode, because things have improved, believe it or not in Windows 11., if you’ve got something even higher in like the highest end.
Ssd that you can get right now, that’s not you know, that’s generally available and not an Enterprise SSD, it’s probably the Samsung 990 and it just barely became available and the Samsung 990 is going to run circles around its counterpart under an AMD raid configuration I’m sorry To say, but that’s just the way that it is oh and for any haters in the audience. Intel’S platform is not dramatically better. The the rst stuff had a lot of promise, but it’s really not a lot better.
There either. I’M really hoping for better operating system fixes, and if you run Linux, it was always the best choice to use either Linux, MD or ZFS or btrfs, or something the support. It’S multiple block devices and both of these platforms are incredible for supporting a whole bunch of m.2 devices for storage in raid 1.. The one possible exception, where maybe maybe AMD raid would make sense, is if you wanted to do a raid one for Mirror. You didn’t really care about the performance trade-off and you just wanted to mirror your information in case an SSD dies. I would humbly suggest that you’re better off to set up your machine for nightly backup snapshots with the native driver, then to try to set up that and deal with that.
It will be less headache, but that’s just one computer janitor’s opinion, so your mileage may vary. Some other notes about the rear i o on both of these motherboards. It’S just HDMI out, there’s no USBC alt mode, there’s some more higher end. You know like that x670e Oris Master motherboard I keep talking about it – does have another USBC port with DisplayPort alt mode, but in terms of like the type and number of USB ports, it’s pretty similar between these two motherboards.
There are four USB 2 ports which is useful for peripherals. Then there’s four USB 5 gigabit ports, two sets of 10 gigabit ports on this motherboard, whereas there’s only one set of 10 gigabit ports on this and, of course, our USBC ports are 20 gigabit. Two by two: that’s the same between both of these, both of them support flashing, the BIOS from a USB stick with a button, even our lesser expensive, motherboard just has a single button for that, but you can also clear the CMOS on top of that with our More expensive, auris master, I mean it kind of makes sense. If you look at the motherboard layout, it’s basically the Spider-Man meme, where they’re pointing at each other.
Although there are some differences, there’s not a huge number of differences, really it’s just PCI Express 5 and where the m.2s connect, if they go directly into the CPU via Lanes intended for the graphics card or via something else. All right. That’S been a quick look at the aorus x670 elite ax and the b650e auris master. These are two motherboards that I would actually buy with my own money, there’s about 350 at the time that I’m doing this and this one’s about 289 give or take it’s time that I’m shooting this video a 289.
You really don’t give up a lot. It is nice that you should get the Intel Nick a little bit higher in 2.5, gigabit Nick on the b650e and, of course, having more PCI Express 5 capabilities and PCI Express 5 GPU capability, for you know a little less than a hundred dollars more. It’S not bad, it’s pretty good, but you really don’t give up a lot with the x670e. There is probably some wisdom in if you want to go, am5 get the cheapest motherboards you possibly can, because it’s not going to hurt your CPU and then, when the new stuff comes out in six months a year whatever, then you can upgrade to something else. A new, motherboard and you’ll have all kinds of new features, and that sort of thing, because if you look back at am4 from x370 to x470, that was a pretty big upgrade and the next 470 to x570. That was an even bigger upgrade. So it is nice to get the platform updates and refreshes, even though am4 had a lot of longevity. It’S shaping up to look like am5 is going to have that same longevity. So if you do invest in a better am5, motherboard you’ll probably be able to get at least a couple more CPU Generations. Out of it. But again you know, in the hand, is worth two in the bush. I don’t know I’m one of this level, one.
It’S been a quick look at these am5 motherboards from gigabyte if there are any other motherboards, you’re curious about or ones that I haven’t covered. Let me know, because I’ve covered a lot of am5 motherboards at this point check those other reviews out on the channel to see if you can find one. That’S you know the right combination of features and price point and everything else I wanted to cover these specifically.
Like I say, because I think gigabyte has got the best pcie layout for people that have a lot of pcie devices where a lot in this case is an admittedly fairly anemic three but hey the other. Layouts are worse. So this is comparatively good right. Most people don’t really have a lot of pcie devices, I’m the exception. A couple of you that are still watching are the exception.
But hey we’ve got a club we’ll get together, we’ll figure it out. There’Ll, be some really cool, am5 motherboards coming they’re. Just you know not launch day motherboards, and it was also kind of weird that motherboard Partners didn’t really seed any of the lower cost motherboards into the market. A couple of them did, but you know, gigabyte, Asus MSI haven’t really heard anything other than about their highest end Flagship motherboards, and so I I think some of these uh middle, the road, lower middle of the road motherboards, I think, are a lot smarter by anyway.
That’S enough of that, I’m one of those level one I’m signing out! You find me in the level one forums. Let me know what questions you have, or what kind of a build you’d like to see with these I’ve got some Linux work to do coming up. So these are going to be pretty interesting. All right, I’m signing out I’ll, see you there.
Thank you. .