5800X/5900X motherboard pairing

Dan_D ,

I would pay money, real money*, if you (or someone you know ;) ) could come up with a matrix so I could see what tier the various motherboards are. I mean, seriously, WTF is better, a TUF or a ROG? The mobo marketers need to be stomped. How the hell do I know which board is better than another? All I can do is open my wallet, count the bills, and then see what board I can afford. Or, is that their purpose? To confuse me so I just throw money at them to make them go away?

I am left to spend days looking at images of the boards, digging up reviews, trying to find VRM information, capacitor country of origin, etc., etc.

You seem to know a thing or two about this stuff... For the love of God, is a "Master" better than a "Prime"?

You get my point...

Thanks,
Ken

*The term "real money" is used in a non-literal sense. Limitations apply. Shipping and Handling fees may make you owe ME money. Face value is less than 1/20 of a cent. Etc.
1602772340098.png


It's a bit dated but it still applies.

Here is a matrix of AMD motherboard information. It contains VRM and component selection as well as more or less rates each boards cooling. It tells you what voltages controllers, power stages, etc. they use and what they are rated at. It even tells you which boards support BIOS Flashback and which ones don't.
 
Dan_D ,

I would pay money, real money*, if you (or someone you know ;) ) could come up with a matrix so I could see what tier the various motherboards are. I mean, seriously, WTF is better, a TUF or a ROG? The mobo marketers need to be stomped. How the hell do I know which board is better than another? All I can do is open my wallet, count the bills, and then see what board I can afford. Or, is that their purpose? To confuse me so I just throw money at them to make them go away?

I am left to spend days looking at images of the boards, digging up reviews, trying to find VRM information, capacitor country of origin, etc., etc.

You seem to know a thing or two about this stuff... For the love of God, is a "Master" better than a "Prime"?

You get my point...

Thanks,
Ken

*The term "real money" is used in a non-literal sense. Limitations apply. Shipping and Handling fees may make you owe ME money. Face value is less than 1/20 of a cent. Etc.
There was a small article back in 2017 and I still see this matrix being utilized often but don't quote me if it's outdated, lol.
https://www.techpowerup.com/237490/...ntation-explained-prime-series-takes-backseat

Edit: Looking like Dan_D beat me to it.
 
It's stupid because ROG Strix is the high end for video cards but not motherboards. ROG (plain) is the high end one there.

Thanks. Since you did this for Asus, you know I'll ask about MSI and Gigabyte. ;)

I guess I'm looking for a ROG Aorus Strix Gamer Prime Platinum board? :)
 
Thanks. Since you did this for Asus, you know I'll ask about MSI and Gigabyte. ;)

I guess I'm looking for a ROG Aorus Strix Gamer Prime Platinum board? :)
Haha, can I please get "all of the above" board.
It's stupid because ROG Strix is the high end for video cards but not motherboards. ROG (plain) is the high end one there.
Yah, I agree. You would think the more names they throw behind it, the higher it goes but seemingly that's when they start introducing other badges like Crosshair, Rampage, Zenith, etc...LOLOL
 
Thanks. Since you did this for Asus, you know I'll ask about MSI and Gigabyte. ;)

I guess I'm looking for a ROG Aorus Strix Gamer Prime Platinum board? :)

I didn't do that for ASUS. That's something their PR department put together. I'll try my best for the others. They don't always make it easy, even for me.

GIGABYTE Series Breakdown

GIGABYTE, like everyone else can be a little hard to figure out. It's probably the easiest manufacturer though as you can pretty much count phases and just look at them physically to figure out where they slot. Like everyone else there is some overlap here and there. The Ultra Durable series encompasses the "Vision" motherboards which are for content creation and replace "Designaire". The Ultra Durable / Vision series isn't necessarily lower end than the others. It replaces the Designare series. These are geared towards content creators. The series is also split between Z490 and W480 chipsets. The latter being for Xeon CPU's. These support ECC memory. They have even less of a gamer vibe to them than the regular Vision motherboards.

GIGABYTE Aorus Gaming
Xtreme Waterforce (Watercooled variant of the Xtreme offering.)
Xtreme (You know it's extreme because it drops the "E". :rolleyes:)
Master
Ultra
Pro
Elite

GIGABYTE Gaming
Gaming X
Gaming

An "M" after the chipset designation indicates it's an mATX model. So, a B550M Gaming X is just the Micro-ATX version of the B550 Gaming X.

GIGABYTE Ultra Durable
GIGABYTE Vision G
GIGABYTE Vision D


MSI Series Breakdown

I hate the way MSI handles their naming convention. It's a mess to try and sort out on their website. They break down by enthusiast gaming, performance gaming and arsenal gaming. These are MEG, MPG and MAG series. There are also Pro boards, but these range in price and quality. You have an X299 Pro-10G and the X570-A Pro in the same series and the two couldn't be further apart. These are really non-gamer boards that are intended for content creators and that sort of thing. The MAG series is a mess as well with the names not really making sense. It's Tomahawk, Mortar, Bazooka, etc. but then you have others like Torpedo. These are more or less easy to figure out by their chipsets with Vector being at the bottom for A520. However, Torpedo seems to slot after Tomahawk but only on the Intel side. MSI changes what it does a lot, so these can be very hard to figure out during transitional periods.

MSI MEG
GODLIKE
ACE
Unify

MSI MPG
Gaming Carbon
Gaming Edge
Gaming Plus

MSI MAG (These names are stupid, Kyle and I told their PR people this to their faces.)
Tomahawk
Mortar / Torpedo (Intel??)
Bazooka
Vector
Torpedo

MSI Pro
Pro and then some suffix
 
Haha, can I please get "all of the above" board.

Yah, I agree. You would think the more names they throw behind it, the higher it goes but seemingly that's when they start introducing other badges like Crosshair, Rampage, Zenith, etc...LOLOL

It used to work like this:

Extreme - Top of the stack. Most feature rich.
Formula - Performance oriented. Feature rich, but geared towards absolute performance.
Hero - Budget performance. These cut some corners but were still nice.
Ranger - This one has switched places with the Hero line and disappeared.

APEX - Was added later. Fortunately these haven't been around long enough to create confusion. These are stripped down like a Hero board, but have the best VRM implementation. These are also designed for LN2 overclocking. (This isn't true for the Z490 based Maximus XII APEX which has a slightly downgraded VRM from the Extreme.)

The Zenith, Rampage, Crosshair, etc. are easy to figure out beyond the fact that there are a lot of them.

Rampage - Intel HEDT
Zenith - AMD HEDT
Crosshair - AMD Mainstream
Maximus - Intel Mainstream

To some extent, this makes some sense as there was confusion back in the day. Extreme and Formula really overlapped each other a lot. Hero was kind of always more budget oriented. Basically, they took the VRM's from the Extreme and Formula, gave it to the Hero creating the APEX. In a sense, that's what they've done. ASUS has had some criticism for its VRM designs, but they still include the same number of power stages, but skipped the doublers entirely. This is to improve transient response. The side effect of this and perhaps the reasoning behind it was to eliminate the cost of the phase doublers. So, its difficult to compare them to something like the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Xtreme. which has 14+2 phases with a single power stage per phase. You have just as many power stages which have the same purpose of improving efficiency.

I'm not an electrical engineer, but the VRM's on these are very good. At least on the upper end ROG boards. But they are difficult to compare to the other guys given their vastly different design.
 
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Dan_D

Wow. That is an outstanding compilation. I'd advocate for pulling those posts out and consolidating them into a sticky at the top of the motherboard forum. @Mods...???

Thank you.

Ken
 
Dan_D

Wow. That is an outstanding compilation. I'd advocate for pulling those posts out and consolidating them into a sticky at the top of the motherboard forum. @Mods...???

Thank you.

Ken

Made some corrections for accuracy.
 
Cross-posting from another thread:

Dan, as one the top motherboard gurus which AMD 5XX boards would you recommend for the following approximate MSRP (ignoring Microcenter sales and the like) price points: $150, $200, $250, $300, $400, and $500?
 
Cross-posting from another thread:

Dan, as one the top motherboard gurus which AMD 5XX boards would you recommend for the following approximate MSRP (ignoring Microcenter sales and the like) price points: $150, $200, $250, $300, $400, and $500?
I'm pretty sure he'd go with MSI and Godlike, Meg Ace/Unify for the 400/300, Tomahawk for the 200, and no idea for the 150.
 
One thing I'd add to MSI - their prestige series (content creator) is generally right up with the Godlike level - x570 Prestige Creation and TRX40 Creation. Don't have any experience with their x399 or x299 kit though.
 
Ive been very happy with my x570 creation board, been problem free since I got it almost a year ago. Plus it was the only board to come with a metric ton of USB ports along with 10g aquantia and 1g intel NICs onboard.
 
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