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r/buildapc•
Introlocutor

B550: What's in it for me?

Build Help

Hey all. Like everyone else, I'm starting my first build. I have my eye on purchasing the B450 Tomahawk Max motherboard with a 3700x CPU.

I keep seeing people advising to wait until B550 to buy a motherboard. However, I'm hoping to hold onto my computer for a good couple years. At most, I'll be replacing the graphics card whenever the new NVidia 3000s release. By the time I'll start a second build, I feel AMD will have moved on to the 5000 series and a new socket.

With this in mind, what would be the intrinsic benefits in choosing B550 over B450 & and would it be enough of a leap for me to go with the B550 instead?

Posted May 23, 2020, 10:52 PM UTC

710
noratat•

There's honestly not many reasons to bother waiting for the B550, and I wish people would stop acting like there are.

  1. Most people are like you - they don't upgrade CPU very often, and in practice it's rarely necessary or cost-effective to do so, whereas GPU upgrades tend to be more frequent and more important

  2. It's usually better to avoid buying new electronics on release day in general. There's often early manufacturing issues / software bugs that you can avoid by waiting until something's been out for a bit, plus early availability is usually tricky. The B450 won't have those issues.

  3. PCIe 4.0 is unlikely to be relevant for most people for quite some time. Going by historical trends, I doubt PCIe 4.0 will matter for GPUs for at least 5 years, likely longer, and NVMe 4.0 is incredibly niche - and anyone who's seriously bottlenecked by disk I/O even with an SSD probably already knows that since it would be pretty obvious.

  4. We still don't know what pricing will be like

That said, I personally plan to wait for the B550, but it's for a very specific and kind of petty reason. I have an ITX build that has a front panel USB-C port, but there's not a single ITX AMD board right now with the connector for it. It looks like one of the new B550 ITX boards will.

Even then, if I were building new today I'd still just get the B450, but my current PC works fine, so waiting isn't a big deal, I just want more cores for a software project I plan to do.

16
[deleted]•

Not enough people saying this ^. Unless 550 solves a specific issue for you, go for the 450 Max. Based on everything described by OP there's no reason to wait and go for 550 and deal with potential release issues.

4
IntrolocutorOP•

Regarding #2; are we to assume they'll be enough supply to go around for B550 boards?

Given the huge demand by enthusiasts and those who were told "Wait on your build until B550 comes out", who's to say that they wouldn't match demand and supply is scarce for the next few weeks or months?

1
AgentArticuno•

Or that civilization and global supply chains will even still exist at that time.

2
laidbackkanga•

Personally I'd rather the little extra headroom with upgrading, and from what I've seen in reviews the vrms seem to be better. And there hasn't been any mention of a socket change. But at the end of the day it's your money and motherboards aren't that expensive.

3
IntrolocutorOP•

Moreso the expectation that the 4000 series will be the last one to be compatible with the current AMD socket.

Kind of the same expectations that Nvidia 3000 series will be coming out this year. Both haven't been confirmed, but people are certainly talking about it like they are

3
laidbackkanga•

Yeah all I've seen is that they've stated the 4000 series won't be supported on older chipsets and they won't change sockets unless they have to. I'd say it's a safe bet they will change for the '5000' series but that's just speculation. But as it stands you'll able to put a top tier 4000 CPU in a b550, a b450, you won't. Being able to get a second hand CPU when everyone upgrades might get you a couple more years out of your build.

1
IntrolocutorOP•

Hasn't AMD confirmed that B450 manufacturers will be able to add 4000 support in future bios updates?

A bit of a workaround and unknown if most motherboards will even have the update at all, but still

2
laidbackkanga•

Just Googled. Yeah looks like it, it'll be dependent on the mobo manufacturers though and by the looks of it you'll be required to buy a brand new 4000 series chip. I only skimmed through it so you may want to do some research on it

1
Supercal95•

With AMD backtracking on the b450/x470 thing, max boards will most certainly be able to support ryzen 4000. It doesn't make financial sense to upgrade a cpu every year anyway, and the 5000 series will feature a new socket plus potentially ddr5 ram support, rendering b550 useless anyway past ryzen 4000. Unless you really need pci gen 4.

2