Evaluate if the upgrade is beneficial based on your current needs and market value.
Evaluate if the upgrade is beneficial based on your current needs and market value.
Hello, your current setup uses a 7950X with an Asus Strix 650E-E motherboard, and it's been around three years. Considering an upgrade to the 850 or 870-E would be worthwhile if you're looking for better performance. With 96GB of RAM, you have plenty of headroom, but the motherboard choice depends on your future needs and budget.
One thing I want to make sure is good are the the heatsinks(cant remember what they are called), pci-e lanes and better connections. I have two NVME drives in, I have space for two more but one of the main lanes if I use one more it will cut lane bandwidth down. Did know if the newer boards are better, especially when use lots of ram.
It’s rarely worthwhile to upgrade your motherboard unless you’re also replacing your CPU. The board you currently have offers strong cooling for power delivery and M.2s, so switching to another AM5 board won’t provide significant gains. Remember, the chipset doesn’t control VRM design, cooling efficiency, or M.2 performance. In fact, some lower-end X870 boards might have inferior VRMs and cooling compared to your existing high-end B650E model. You should consider what you truly need from these additional M.2 drives—your specific use case matters. This situation doesn’t justify a board upgrade just because you anticipate future needs; it only applies if you’re hitting a lane limit in your current setup.
There are no compatibility issues with RAM because the memory controller is built into the CPU. There’s no need to upgrade at all. Your current board performs just fine for any AM5 processor. The PCIe lane problem will likely affect most AM5 boards since the CPU limits those lanes. Essentially, spending money on a new motherboard seems unnecessary.
I'm worried about the PCI E lanes because I purchased two extra NVME storage units. One holds the main operating system and some applications, while the other is dedicated solely to games. Each costs about a terabyte. I bought two 2TB NVME drives to boost space for both productivity tasks and gaming. The first will handle 3D design and rendering, and the second is reserved for game files only. Adding another drive would mean installing a new OS, which isn't ideal. I prefer keeping things simple and wanted to avoid reloading or copying files for the new gaming drive. It also provides extra capacity for work and entertainment.
The 3D rendering process is tailored to your main role. For the workflow, we need a setup that includes both scratch and project-based approaches.
I examined your board more closely and found that the main competition is between the top PCIe x16 port and the M.2_3 slot. To prevent the GPU from dropping to just 8 lanes, avoid using the M.2_3 slot. It seems you plan to use two NVMe drives for operating systems and work, and two more for games and other non-work tasks. The better approach is to swap one of the new NVMe drives with a standard 2.5" SATA SSD. This keeps your setup to just three drives and eliminates the need for the high-speed slot. Most games don’t require the extra speed of NVMe—they perform just fine on regular SATA drives. While load times might be slightly slower on a SATA drive, it will still be sufficient and won’t impact gameplay significantly. Only a few of the latest demanding titles (such as Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart) truly need an NVMe for smooth performance. Overall, you likely don’t need both new drives to be NVMe.