Motherboards B450 Carbon Pro vs X570 Tomahawk

Hi guys,

TLDR; new build, stick with b450 carbon or spend £100 extra on the upcoming x570 tomahawk + return b450 carbon?

Background: I'm in the process of putting together a build, B450 carbon / Ryzen 3600 / 16GB of ram / GTX1070 SC. I'm after a system that'll be stable and have an upgrade path to AMD 4000 CPUs. When AMD initially said b450 wouldn't support next gen CPUs, I ended up getting an RMA for the b450 and pre-ordering the x570 tomahawk. Now, just heard that AMD have backtracked and their next gen CPUs will be supported on the b450. My dilemma is whether to stick with the b450 carbon or go for the upcoming x570 tomahawk. I'm not in a rush to complete the build so happy to wait for the tomahawk to be released. The price difference is £100. My reasons to stick with the b450 are:

• no chipset fan, unlike the x570 - I've never had a motherboard with a chipset fan so this is an unknown to me
• £100 less

Reasons to ditch b450 and go x570

• new build so makes sense to go for the later tech
• upgrade path to 4000 CPUs likely to be more straightforward(?)
• generally more features so more head room for future upgrades e.g. USB ports/M2 slots/SATA ports etc...

What would you do in my position?

 

I'd wait for the B550 boards to release any time now. Should be most of the x570 spec, no chipset fan and be cheaper

 

I'd go for the X570, or wait for the B550 boards. The X570 will hold it's value better down the line due to the better CPU support going forward.
The upgrade on b4xx series boards for Zen 3 looks like it'll be a tad sketchy - beta BIOSes, no way to flashback and losing support for some CPUs.

 

I wouldn't worry about chipset fan, only comes on when you are spanking gen 4 NVMe drives, plenty of people build with possible upgrade path but in reality will never upgrade, so think about whether it really does matter, next gen has been a few % perf bump and great if its a cheap drop in but the benefit of next gen chips on old platforms is marginal as a lot of the improvements come from the platform beyond just the CPU core and it is more likely that CPU gen after that will be more interesting and a better upgrade bump, so would it be better to just be happy on b450 and 3000 for now, it is plenty quick and skip a gen. I tend to do that with my hardware.

the 450 vs 570, I would go 570 as I would want to have the better available options to me, typically 570 has better lane config and of course PCIe 4 should you hold on to it for a few years it will be more relevant, b550 will feature some of this stuff but will likely have same pcie slot restrictions b450 does but again if you don't need the extras b450/550 is just fine.

 

I hear these are dropping mid-June?

Yeah, the beta BIOSes are a bit of a concern. May be some teething issues initially. Given I'm in build mode, would make sense to go for b550 or x570.

Fair points, the more I think about it the more I'm now considering x570 vs b550 haha.

A lot of wisdom in this post, thanks for the replies.

 

I don't think you remember quite how horrible chipset fans used to be! Its one of the worst returns to modern computing.

 

Never been a problem for me in the past and those were ones on none stop, I have had boards with chipset fans, vrm fans etc, no issue, fans are a thing, you don't really avoid them, bad big fans can be as bad as poor little fans.

Asus has fitted a very poor fan on my M2 expander though ....whine, so it does still happen you can get crap fans in this day and age but equally I have small fans on my HTPC and its no problem.

 

Exactly, so its pointless to go for a platform that has one over a platform that doesn't. Why take that risk.

 

There is a big difference between then and now though:

Back then you undid two pushpins and the whole cooler / fan assembly came off leaving you free to replace it with whatever cooling solution you wanted (better fan / passive / water), these days however the fans are custom jobs embedded deep into the stick on tat effectively bricking the mobo if anything goes wrong with the fan.

 

I doubt it is very different now, not taken one apart to know but generally these things custom heatsinks with very standard fans, can't imagine any manufacturer spending actual design effort on something that has worked for decades and has many component suppliers, complete waste of resources.

 

Correct!

 

DSR.

 

/Pendant hat on
Consumer Contracts Regulations replaced DSR in 2014
/Pedant hat off

Effectively it's the same in that you can return goods unopened within 14 days of receipt and get basic delivery charge too. If you paid for express delivery and the cheapest one they offered was free, well you will get refunded the 'free'.

That's how I understand it anyway.

 

No it's the law.

 

I contacted the retailer a few days ago and they said so long as no seals have been broken, they'll accept the return so all good.

 

The B450 Pro Carbon appears to have it's SATA lanes arranged in such a way that using the M.2 slot disables some SATA ports, that's really weird to me.

Anyway, another vote to wait a little bit for B550 or get the Tomahawk, which is at the top of my list as retailers don't seem to be playing silly buggers with the pricing of it. Since it's MSI it will have a silent mde for the chipset fan too, which will be nice.

 

This behaviour won't be resolved by chipset, lane limitation are inherent to the mainstream platform, to avoid this you need to pay specific attention to what particular models do with their lane allocations, you might be able to find b450 boards that don't do this and it is also likely that you will find b550 ones that still do it.

x570 boards typically have better lane configurations if you want to make use of lanes, unfortunately not many of the lower end board pay much attention, I guess their thinking is if you are cheaping out on board you aren't the type to worry about high end storage, which I guess is fair enough, you need to segment products somehow.

If you want loads of lanes TR is the way forward, amusingly the boards for that platform are better specced and cheaper than most good highend x570 of course the CPUs cost a lot more,

 

Loads of boards do that. I've had three X99 boards that all did the same.