Thursday, July 11th 2024
The B650E Aorus Stealth Ice is Gigabyte's First Motherboard for AMD CPUs with its Connectors on the Back
Gigabyte's new Stealth series of motherboards has to date only had a single product, the Z690 Aorus Elite Stealth, but now, Gigabyte has added its first Stealth board for AMD CPUs. The B650E Aorus Stealth Ice not only has all of its connectors on the back of the board, but it also has a white/silver PCB with a similarly coloured front and back cover. Apart from the DIMM slots, all connectors are also in somewhat matching colours, although judging by the pictures, the colours don't quite match on all the connectors and slots. That aside, the B650E Aorus Stealth Ice is a pretty competent board, as long as you're not interested in adding anything more than a graphics card and some NVMe SSDs, as it has zero additional PCIe expansion slots. It's a rather bold move by Gigabyte, but at the same time, most gamers and consumers don't tend to add PCIe devices to their computers outside of additional storage these days.
Besides the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, you get two M.2 sockets wired to the CPU, one PCIe 5.0—with its own, larger heatsink—and one PCIe 4.0, as well as a third PCIe 4.0 M.2 socket via the chipset. There's also support for four SATA 6 Gbps drives if more storage is needed. Gigabyte has also added an internal HDMI 1.4 port that's limited to 1080p30, which is intended to be used with Gigabyte's LCD Edge View display. Other connectivity on the back of the PCB includes a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) port, a USB 3.2 (5 Gbps) pin-header as well as the usual USB 2.0, fan headers and LED headers that you'd expect from a modern motherboard. The VRM design is a 12+2+2 design with a 60 Amp DrMOS configuration for the 12+2 phases for the CPU and GPU.
Around the rear of the board you'll find a single HDMI 2.1 port which is limited to 4K 60 Hz, a USB Type-C port that delivers 10 Gbps of data in most instances—but will support USB4 with the right APU in the CPU socket—that also offers PD Alt Mode support for up to 4K 144 Hz. There's also a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port, Gigabyte's newWiFi EZ-Plug for the WiFi antenna, which is connected to a MediaTek MT7925 WiFi 7 / Bluetooth 5.4 module, which sadly is limited to 160 MHz channel width. Finally there are two 10 Gbps USB Type-A ports, five 5 Gbps USB-Type A ports and four USB 2.0 ports, three audio jacks connected to the old ALC897 audio chip and a Q-Flash Plus button. Overall it looks like a pretty competent B650E board, but with the 800-series chipset just around the corner, it might have been wiser to release this as a B850 board, at least to win over consumers that don't know that the two are the same chipset. Gigabyte provides a list of compatible chassis here.
Sources:
Gigabyte, via VideoCardz
Besides the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, you get two M.2 sockets wired to the CPU, one PCIe 5.0—with its own, larger heatsink—and one PCIe 4.0, as well as a third PCIe 4.0 M.2 socket via the chipset. There's also support for four SATA 6 Gbps drives if more storage is needed. Gigabyte has also added an internal HDMI 1.4 port that's limited to 1080p30, which is intended to be used with Gigabyte's LCD Edge View display. Other connectivity on the back of the PCB includes a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbps) port, a USB 3.2 (5 Gbps) pin-header as well as the usual USB 2.0, fan headers and LED headers that you'd expect from a modern motherboard. The VRM design is a 12+2+2 design with a 60 Amp DrMOS configuration for the 12+2 phases for the CPU and GPU.
94 Comments on The B650E Aorus Stealth Ice is Gigabyte's First Motherboard for AMD CPUs with its Connectors on the Back
This is what the antenna looks like.
Asus variant
You either get data and nothing else, or data and DP Alt Mode. USB4/Thunderbolt is still really rare, but I guess we should see more of that on next gen boards.
However, I think only Asus offers a handful of boards than can do 65 W USB PD and then only via the port on the case.
Also, keep in mind that the cable used to connect the to the case USB-C port, removes that much distance for any cables connected to the case connector.
In all fairness, we'll never see all ports supporting full USB PD, but you'd hope for at least one, so you don't need a separate charger for your phone.At least everyone decided to more or less copy Asus design, minus the proprietary graphics card power connector.
So we won't be getting half a dozen different solutions that have ultra limited case compatibility.The header only supports one USB Type-C port, due to the lack of directionality of USB-C.ASRock has a suitable board coming.
videocardz.com/newz/asrock-next-gen-z890-taichi-aqua-motherboard-doesnt-have-a-single-usb-type-a-port
Always thought this was most common nomenclature.
And this really should have been a mATX design with that much wasted PCB space.
The dominant factor in all the form factors we've seen succeed in the last 30 years has been ubiquity at mainstream price points.
If global availability and pricing of these boards and their associated cases fails to stay close to the availability and pricing of the dominant ATX regular standard, they're dead. Maybe not right now, but they'll just slowly die off like all the other standards we've had that tried to improve things but needed different cases and boards. Look at where Flex-ATX, Nano-ITX, STX, BTX variants, DTX variants, and EVGA's failed HPTX to name just a few that were killed by poor availability, pricing, or both.
That M2 heatsink will cause some clearance issues. And yeah, it's an ATX board with a single PCI-E slot.
And yes, this could've been a mATX board, but are there any suitable cases for those?MSI got your back/rear/bottom.
www.msi.com/Motherboard/PRO-H610M-C-EX/Actually, no. I have one like that on my board and there are surprisingly no issue with clearance.
There's nothing in the standard that describes the topside of the PCB, so there's some ambiguity there since front is the opposite of both rear and back, with the spec already explicitly defining front and rear. I guess as a result, the confusion will continue! Until the first mITX board appeared that jammed an M.2 slot on the back of the motherboard, there was no need to distinguish between the front and back of a motherboard, but I guess when using terms front and back people just need to clarify if they're referring to the motherboard as a single item, or the PC as a whole.
In general it looks like the keep out zones for the cutouts are located near the mounting points.
- Mining board with 16 PCIe x1 slots?
- NAS board with 18 SATA ports?
- Premium boards with 23 USB on them?
I'm sure that's only the tip of the iceberg for ASRock...!For example the Adata case from yesterday, InWin D5, Corsair 3500X or Asus GT302 all have the appropiate cutouts.
It does feel very proprietary though. if they could manage connections on both sides of the board (I don't see how) that would allow for more mounting options.
Not loving that it only has one PCIe slot though.
I guess the motherboard plate is going to get weaker and weaker, until it bends when you screw in the motherboard.
ThermalTake is guaranteed to do a super cheap case that will bend when you install the board.Welcome to the future. I'm sure a lot of Apple users are feeling your pain.
Now the power connectors are near the parts of the board that need the most power (I don't know precisely where those are so I put the 24-pin between the CPU and PCIe slots; sue me).
Now the chipset connectors are (mostly) on the opposite side of the chipset.
Instead of cutting half-a-dozen extra, irregularly-shaped holes in a chassis motherboard tray, you only need 2 or 3 larger ones (so chassis machining is cheaper and faster). And of course cables don't need to be as long, nor is routing them so much of a pain. But most importantly, trace lengths are far shorter, which also means you don't need traces that are as thick, so as a board manufacturer you basically just win. You can then put the money saved from that into even more unnecessary "thermal armour" on the bottom surface!
FYI, as I already mentioned, everyone is following Asus layout more or less here, so moving the connectors, means that there would no longer be a standard.
If you want to be angry at someone for not doing enough from the start, talk to Asus, as they started this mess.Are you a PCB layout engineer now? Trust me, that layout wouldn't work. You'd get a metric ton of crosstalk and interference and the boards wouldn't pass EMI testing. I have been involved in enough board design projects to know that what you're proposing above isn't feasible.I fully agree that this should've been in a more organised manner, but as the four big motherboard makers refuse to sit down in the same room to discuss things like this, this is what we get. Intel is no longer running the show and mandate form factors, which is also why we're stuff with ATX, instead of having started over fresh with something that is a bit more thought out. However, if you think you can get these companies to meet up and agree on a common standard, the world would owe you a favour.
All that extra room to fill your case with Funko Pops and other assorted junk! :rolleyes: