Is this your view? Many feel AM5 motherboards fall short in performance and compatibility.
Is this your view? Many feel AM5 motherboards fall short in performance and compatibility.
Purchase X670e instead of X870 because it offers better performance and features tailored to your needs.
I swear to god the X870 boards are some how worst. All of Asus' X870 boards only have 2 pcie slots and apparently only one is full speed as far as I can tell. Msi and gigabyte only seem to have 3. also a use case for PCI, 10 gig networking which Linus and the gang are always obsessing over, basically no motherboards come with it (except for the god like boards and whatever asus sells for 1 grand but dude come on)
I own a few Asus Hyper M.2 cards, though I believe they’re better suited for Threadripper boards. It’s odd they came with B550 boards, huh?
Many devices now support USB4 and Wi-Fi 7, which I find sufficient. 10Gb speeds are rare, and for those seeking them, there exist alternatives beyond relying on the motherboard. Do you really need these PCIe slots? It seems like a requirement that feels overcomplicated. I’ve been using my Z97 Impact for seven years because of its capabilities, and I’ve customized boards to match specific needs—this is something I can relate to. Likely the top boards with some niche features are the Pro Art models from Asus. The rest depend on personal preferences and matter in different ways. I’m not sure I noticed this comparison, but the RTX 5090 versus 4090 debate is quite extensive. Of course, it’s faster than a RTX 4090, but it’s mainly about the hardware complexity. With such limited architectural changes from AD to GB, the RTX 5090 gets a lot of jokes as the 'RTX 4090 ti.' It really only shines by featuring a bigger, more power-hungry chip. It’s almost the same as comparing the RTX 4080 and 4090. The X600 and X800 chipsets are similar in this regard, though the X800 doesn’t cut features like the newer series does with 32-bit Physx support.
You don't have multiple x16 lanes in any of those boards. You may have multiple long slots, but only one can use 16 lanes at the same time, and some of them are locked at x8 or x4 even if everything else is empty. In the end, there is a PCIE lanes limitation in the CPUs itself, and there's a trend to allocate those (few) lanes to slots that match the available bandwidth, and offer fewer "physically x16" slots that allow you to use "long" devices at reduced bandwidth. I personally would prefer those PCIe 5 lanes to be split into multiple x8/x16 PCIe 4 or PCIe 3 lanes, since I will use the first slot for a GPU (which doesn't need PCIe 5) and I can't actually take advantage of PCIe 5 storage speeds in any of the other slots after that. But that kind of switching probably would add to the cost, and I'm not exactly a trend-setter either.
I've been trying to understand which scenarios truly benefit from four or more M.2 drives. While professionals like video or photo editors might use three—one for the operating system, one for project files, and another as a scratch disk—I'm not sure about any widespread consumer needs beyond that. For most everyday users, gaming or basic home office tasks usually require only two M.2 SSDs. Or perhaps someone setting up a file server or a home lab would benefit from many SATA drives. My thoughts suggest that a setup with four to five M.2 slots and just a few SATA ports probably won't be very practical for the average customer. But I might be missing something!
Many users won't require additional slots beyond an x16 port, but the x670e falls short compared to its AM4 predecessor. While the earlier version supported dual x8 configurations in its main PCIe lanes, the AM5 design doesn’t offer that flexibility. I believe NVMe ports are far more likely to see adoption than the older x1 PCIe connectors you mentioned. Individuals tend to upgrade storage by installing a new NVMe drive rather than relying on random x1 slots. SATA SSDs aren't particularly impressive, especially when you weigh cost versus speed—NVMes offer comparable storage capacity at a much lower price per TB. Your concerns would make more sense if you were discussing traditional HDDs for large-scale storage. Still, you could easily repurpose an unused NVMe slot into one of the extra SATA ports with an ASM1166 board, adding six more SATA connections. Overall, your feedback seems focused on a particular model that experienced a downgrade. Other releases maintained consistent features despite socket changes, like the ProArt series. Personally, I upgraded from a B550 ProArt to an x670e ProArt without any issues—still have dual x8 slots for GPUs and USB-C video passthrough. The B650 model could have worked too, but I chose PCIe 5.0 for better performance. The x870e was an option, but it came at a higher price with no significant advantage.
The upcoming build will skip SATA, using two NVMe drives plus an external USB-C, as long as the boards include wireless support.