I'm cheesed that there are no B650 boards with optical outputs and above ALC897 audio for a fair price. Couldn't care less about PCIE5 and don't want to pay a premium for it.
Get a PCIe card?
So I have to pay extra to replace a feature that was taken from my B550 board on top of the premium price. On an MATX form factor. When I like large videocards. And run a second LAN card. No thanks bro.
I recently paid $409 for an MSI MAG B650M Mortar and that was the cheapest AM5 board available from a local retailer at the time. Prices are dropping quick.
@kipps: Typical price of a decent m-atx motherboard with a mid-range chipset is around $150~250, that has generally been the case in the past. There is always a cost premium at launch, especially when a new technology or platform is introduced, but they always drop down to their typical price bracket after production ramps up, economies of scales kick in early adopters who are willing to pay a premium dry up. You just have to wait a few months..
Lots of good USB soundcards have Optical too.
Since Optical is still just digital; the cheapest ebay one will be just as capable of passing 1's and 0's to your quality dac.
I agree it sucks when things get taken away (like phones without headphone jacks, or battery doors) but at least this is only a $15 accessory to add the feature back.
@OMGJL: He didn't ask for a DAC. He asked for Optical Out.
Since it's still digital, there's no difference in quality between cheap, and expensive.
The DAC will be in his reciever; which is what 'sets' the quality.
There are literally dozens on ebay and aliexpress in different shapes and forms.
@MasterScythe: I'm so confused about what he wants and why? What's the use case for optical audio here? Running it off of the onboard audio which sucks?
Idk I don't see the usecase where you'd cry foul here.
@TheFyrd: No, I think you're missing a step in understanding types of audio signal is all.
The reason Onboard can "suck" is because its the last step, before reaching a speaker. The onboard audio chip is responsible for turning the 1's and 0's (digital) into a sinewave (analogue) to output.
Optical however, is still just digital, its still 1's and 0's. It can't have "quality", it either gets there without error or doesnt.
Same for all digital.
Just like how a $1 hdmi cable is just as good as a $500 'MONSTER' hdmi cable.
The thing you send it to is usually a decoder/DAC whos job it is to make it into a sinewave.
The "quality" of toslink/optical is always 'perfect' otherwise, its 'not working'.
@MasterScythe: Okay so say you have the standalone DAC say fan favourite The Schitt Modi (what I use currently) is there any benefit to using an optical cable to connect from my PC to the DAC over the USB, conventional wisdom says not really. You however can connect to a device via the onboard optical cable right? So in that instance, you would be using the onboard audio which is le'crap.
@TheFyrd: The onboard optical isnt onboard "audio" its onboard digital.
Usb, optical, coax, hdmi, firewire, binary punchcard; all are identical quality. Connect how you wish.
Its all 1's and 0's; it cant be crap in the way onboard audio can.
@TheFyrd: USB requires drivers whereas optical does not, is a big thing because lots of DACs are really good but have really shiit drivers.
If you want good audio why are you relying on your mobo audio chip, they're all just varying degrees of 'passable'. Even an apple dongle's better.
OP is talking about using onboard optical/coax digital output, not analog output.
He mentioned a realtek mobo chip as a standard for what quality he was looking for, I just went from there.
@JerraJones: Yep, I just meant that if you're using digital output, then it mostly doesn't matter because you're offloading (via passthrough) audio digitally to an external DAC.
While you can use a USB adaptor, there's niche scenarios where it's desirable to have optical/coax onboard. One such scenario is if you need to encode PCM audio to lossy Dolby/DTS on-the-fly (Dolby Digital Live/DTS Connect) for outputting compressed 5.1 audio for gaming to an AV receiver, for people who don't want to use ARC/eARC or those with older receivers. Benefit being that you can connect your GPU directly to your TV over HDMI 2.1 and therefore maintain G-Sync while you maintain surround audio. While AV receivers with HDMI 2.1 support VRR, G-Sync won't work. So you end up in a scenario where you're choosing between G-Sync or 5.1 audio.
Looking at the block diagram for this, the PCIE allocation is pretty well laid out.
From an I/O perspective, I would actually take this over most X670E/X670 boards.
You do end up sacrificing a few things vs some X670/E but not enough that most people would notice.
Definitely nice to have the PCIe x4 slot connected directly to the CPU, assuming the block diagram is correct - it's listed as being connected to the chipset in the specifications.
Wi-Fi is something this board doesn't have that a reasonable chunk of the market might be interested in.
I think I'd personally also prefer to have a third slot to split the x16 slot into two x8 slots, but it's not something most people need. A better audio codec and more comprehensive rear I/O wouldn't go astray either. And finally 4 SATA ports is a bit light for me, but I'm a bit of a hoarder so…
Nice find
This should be the standard of regular price for b650 boards
Urgh no optical outs on these boards…
I noticed a lot of boards this gen are without optical out. I guess very few people using optical out to a DAC as an example. MSI seems to have it more than other brands but I'm sure they will follow next gen.
The vast majority of DACs plug in via USB and can output over optical. No need to use the mobo one.
Nothing quite like a crappy USB DAC driver… No thanks
This+ wifi6e pice card
Vs just get the wifi version?
$27 shipping regional WA :(
Seems AMD systems are popular here on ozb
For the last few years they've been superior. Compare Zen 4 to 13th gen Core, the only way Intel can beat AMD on most metrics is to massively up the power envelope. Sure, Intel's done some good work in order to hit that power without dramatically reducing reliability, but it's similar to the P4 days when they deliberately designed a chip for massive clocks to win the clock wars at the expense of all else (including, possibly, their reputation). Don't get me wrong, 12 and 13th gen have been fine enough, but they're hardly leading AMD, they've been playing catch up for years, and resorting to shifting the goalposts in order to achieve it (which is typical Intel).
And in my day job I recently made an argument for why we should go all in on Intel and secured a refresh cycle of a couple of thousand devices a year for the next five years - I don't dismiss or hate Intel, they're the right platform for certain circumstances. But in terms of current architectures? AMD have been stronger for a while, and we're all very much better off if both companies can remain strongly competitive.
Don't overclock your ram, set it at 4800Mhz to avoid a boot-up nightmare.
Back in stock at same price, well done to Scorptec for being the only retailer offering a decent AM5 deal
Shows as 319 for me. I don't think special is going on anymore!
Nice, cheapest AM5 board by quite a margin.