Wednesday, October 18th 2023
Gigabyte Expands its Range of White Motherboards with Two AMD B650 Models
Just over a month ago, Gigabyte launched a pair of white motherboards for Intel CPUs and now the company has quietly released a pair of white models for AMD CPUs. The two models are the B650 AORUS Elite AX Ice and the B650M AORUS Elite AX Ice, the main difference being the form factor, as the latter is a microATX board. Besides the white PCB, all of the heatsinks are silver/white in colour, although all the connectors on the boards are black, just as with the Intel boards. The rear I/O shield has also been given the white treatment to better fit into a white case.
However, the Ice boards are not identical in terms of specs to their older siblings, as Gigabyte has done a few minor changes that aren't noticeable at first look. Gigabyte has shifted away from using MTK/AMD and Intel WiFi cards and is now using the Realtek RTL8852CE on these new boards. We should mention that Gigabyte are using the RTL8852CE on later revisions of the black versions as well. It's currently unknown when these new boards will be available and how much they'll retail for.
Sources:
B650 AORUS Elite AX Ice, B650M AORUS Elite AX Ice, via @momomo_us on X/Twitter
However, the Ice boards are not identical in terms of specs to their older siblings, as Gigabyte has done a few minor changes that aren't noticeable at first look. Gigabyte has shifted away from using MTK/AMD and Intel WiFi cards and is now using the Realtek RTL8852CE on these new boards. We should mention that Gigabyte are using the RTL8852CE on later revisions of the black versions as well. It's currently unknown when these new boards will be available and how much they'll retail for.
28 Comments on Gigabyte Expands its Range of White Motherboards with Two AMD B650 Models
This is nuthin but False advertising IMHO...:D
Maybe these types of posts could be labeled somehow to clearly distinguish a "PR" from "Commentary" or "Editorial"...what ya think @TheLostSwede ?
It's better to have more USB-A where it is clear they are slower from the shape and color, as opposed to 4x USB-C wired to USB2 and 6x USB-C wired to USB3 and 1x USB-C wired to 10G. That shit was annoying enough in 2003 when only 2 ports on a motherboard handled USB2.0 but none of them were marked, so you had to test every port until you found one that could run external drives at a speed exceeding floppy disks.
TIA !
to sum up a summary of a very long topic, i'll start with a simple question: what features should those 11 usb-a ports that have been magically poofed into usb-c ports have, and how are consumers going to know what features those tightly packed usb-c ports on that motherboard have?
what types of usb-c cables are compatible with them?
*there's* your reason.
------------
gigabyte's tech support would murder you in your sleep. if you managed to survive your first night, start worrying about daytime assassins.
why?
how many call, emails, and texts should they have to field regarding this?
off the top of my head and not having sleep in 53 hours (i'm moving), here's a handful of questions that'd get asked:
- i connected 12 monitors to my motherboard! why come it doesn't work?
- i connected 12 of my kids pcs and phones to the usb-c >8 x10 meter usb-c to usb-c fiber optic wires to replace our old 1gbe network, but how do i get it installed and make the printer work
- i can't charge my 8 flashlights!
- my quest 3 vr doesn't work on 8 of the 12 usc ports. why?
- where do i plug my wireless keyboard dongle?
- can i charge my laptop in like 12 minutes? that's a dozen times faster, and there's a dozen charging ports?
and so forth ad nauseam, until shotguns (or my personal favorite: thermite) are seen as a viable cure to the infection of ”usc”, ”lightning-c”, ”those new bi-sexual connectors”
Would have been useful to have them when I was planning to upgrade my old B360M Motar Titanium (silver motherboard).
I had to gave up on the white/silver motherboard idea in the end.
Oh well, all white builds are near impossible anyway, you can't get away from black and gray so it's always a Panda system.Truth be told, when it comes to plug USB-C stuff using only data, you can buy cheap USB-A to USB-C pass-through adapters on the cheap and since you put them on the back of the motherboard, they don't bother like when used on a laptop.
What bother me is the lack of USB-C with more than just data capabilities but stuff that you can't do on a USB-A port are kind of a niche feature right now.
My motherboard have a USB-C with display (via a Display Port input) which is useful to connect to USB-C displays with one cable. As I said, kind of niche.
What's less niche is USB 4.0/Thunderbolt, but this is because of the cost. Like on laptops, you see these features only on high end devices, although getting it on a desktop PC cost more than on laptops right now because of the requirements of high-end motherboards or rare add-in cards and that sucks.
The rest is usually covered by the specs page and there are also symbols on the I/O shield to let you know the capabilities of the ports.
Yes, USB-C is a bit of a mess, but it's not that hard to figure out.Well, Thunderbolt has nothing to do with USB-C for starters, that was Intel appropriating the same connector and it's on them.
As for the other features, it's not entirely straight forward for sure, but it's even worse on phones, where most phones only support USB 2.0 speeds.
The issue once again comes down to cost though, how much are people willing to pay for the extra features?
What sucks is that both AMD and Nvidia dropped USB-C connectors from their cards, which lead to the OEMs doing it as well, so from two generations ago, we've gone backwards and lost connectivity.
Notebooks seem to be somewhat better when it comes to USB-C at least, but still not great.
I guess we're going to have to wait for USB4 to gain some ground until all the features you want are commonplace, but even so, it'll only be on a port or two, due to cost and the amount of bandwidth required from the host system side.
As you can see, on higher end boards, things like DP support is clearly labelled.
1. Thunderbolt may be independent of USB-C, but reusing the connector instead of inventing a new one seems like a good move.
2. Do you honestly think that "clearly labeled" helps? Most of the time that port is close to the floor, facing the wall, good luck reading that label ;)
What I think it would be acceptable it would be at one USB-C port at the front of the case that supports everything that USB-C does (perhaps not Thunderbolt), one port at the back supporting everything and at least a couple more USB-C port at the back supporting USB 3.2 2x2 transfer speeds. I, for one, would pay more for that if that saves me from managing adapters and USB-C to USB-A cables.
Also, yeah, USB 2.0 on phones hurts big time. It's faster to upload your files to the cloud and download them from there to your PC than it is to transfer them via USB :(