And with that said, let us know which of these B650 boards you're planning on buying, or perhaps you've already bought your board. Either way, let us know in the comments section. Hopefully, this B650 buying guide was helpful to you. If so, please share it with your peers; it might help us muster up the energy to do this again with another generation of motherboards. Shopping Shortcuts: AMD B550 Ultra Durable Motherboard with Pure Digital VRM Solution, PCIe 4.0 x16 Slot, Dual PCIe 4.0/3.0 M.2 Connectors, 802.11ac WIFI, Realtek GbE LAN, Smart Fan 6 with FAN STOP, RGB FUSION 2.0, Q-Flash Plus

The Asus TUF Gaming B650M-Plus WiFi is also noteworthy. It's a MicroATX board with a dozen 60A power stages for the vcore VRM. Although decent on paper, it doesn't really surpass the B650M Aorus Pro AX, especially given it offers significantly fewer USB 3.2 ports. Some high-end boards support USB Power Delivery (PD) and output up to 60W at 20V/3A. Not only can you fast charge your smartphone with these ports, but larger devices like tablets and some laptops, too. To support that much power, you’ll need to plug a spare 6-pin PCIe connector to plug into the board. Otherwise, you’ll be limited to the 20V/1.5A and 30W. For the midrange B650 chipset, just one of the PROM21 chips is used. On some boards, you’ll find USB 4 support via an ASMedia ASM4242 controller, which outputs two USB 4 ports from four PCIe 4.0 lanes via the CPU, while also supporting DisplayPort v1.4 (thus video) through the interface. Robust Power Solution:10 + 2 power stages with an 8-pin ProCool power connector, high-quality alloy chokes, and durable capacitors to support multi-core processors AMD B550 Mini-ITX AORUS Motherboard with Direct 8 Phases Digital VRM, Advanced Thermal Design with Extended VRM Heatsink, Thermal Baseplate, Dual PCIe 4.0/3.0 M.2 with Thermal Guard, Intel ® WiFi 6 802.11ax, 2.5GbE LAN, RGB FUSION 2.0, Q-Flash PlusAnother viable option at this price point is the Gigabyte B650M Aorus Elite AX, which includes a dozen 60A power stages for the vcore VRM, albeit with just two PCIe expansion slots. It includes a PCIe 5.0-enabled M.2 port, an additional PCIe 4.0 M.2, eleven USB 3.2 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, and WiFi 6E.

Today is the day when we can finally present to you the results of our extensive AMD B650 motherboard testing. It's been a massive undertaking indeed. In total, we've tested 35 boards, a task that spanned several months, but it's finally complete. Unlike Intel, AMD chose to go all in with DDR5 and so does not support DDR4 on its new platform. Since DDR5 is available in greater volume and prices are coming down (though still a lot higher than DDR4), this was arguably a good choice on AMD’s part. The highest in-spec frequency for the existing AM5 SKUs is DDR5-5200. But AMD did share that DDR5-6000 will be the sweet spot for Zen 4. X670 (and rumored B650) Motherboards: The Full List (So Far) For the stress test, we're using the Ryzen 9 7950X and for the load, Cinebench R23, which was looped for an hour, at which point we're reporting the maximum PCB temperature, again recorded using K-Type thermocouples.The Aorus Master price doesn't make much sense at this time. The Taichi is a decent board but isn't spectacular at anything, though it does offer USB 4 support out of the box, which might be beneficial to you. That leaves Asus' E Gaming, which we think is the best high-end option here. Port configuration settings between different BIOS versions or share them with friends. Q-Fan Control High-Performance Networking:On-board WiFi 6E (802.11ax), Bluetooth ® 5.2, and Intel ®2.5G Ethernet with ASUS LANGuard As long as you have good case airflow it'll be ok but I did see it cross the 70°C mark, and that’s with an open case and airflow from the AIO cooler. It's well within limits, but If you plan to thrash a high core count CPU inside a cramped case, you must keep an eye on the VRM temperatures.