B550 offers more performance and features compared to X570, making it a stronger upgrade option.
B550 offers more performance and features compared to X570, making it a stronger upgrade option.
You're evaluating upgrades for your MSI B450 Tomahawk. The X570 offers more power and better performance than the B550, while the B505 gaming plus is another option. With a $180 budget, you'll want to balance cost and future needs—especially since you're thinking about a used Ryzen 5000 later.
I wouldn't consider that an upgrade. B550 chipset based motherboards offer pci-e 4.0 for the video card and the m.2 connector and also bring support for the Ryzen 5xxx series. A lot of b550 boards have a significantly better VRM for the CPU (the dc-dc converter that converts 12v from the power supply to 0.7-1.5v used by the processor) The 5900x is not very power hungry, but even so a lot of B450 boards will get quite hot powering such processor and in extreme situations the processor may even be slowed down a bit to allow for that circuit to cool down to reasonable temperatures. Your particular motherboard will probably be fine with a 5900x but it's just average ... even some low end b550 motherboards now have better power delivery circuits or better heatsinks to keep that circuit cool. What CPU are you considering, anything below 5900X will run just fine.
PCI-E 3.0 with 16 lanes isn't limiting for a PCI-E 4.0 16-lane card. It fits a PCI-E 4.0 x8 slot since such a card functions at PCI-E 3.0 x8. For instance, the Radeon RX 6650XT works in PCI-E 4 x8, while a non-xt 6700 is an x16 slot. On a PCI-E 4 board the RX 6650XT runs slightly better, but on a PCI-E 3 board it lags noticeably—keep your motherboard in mind.