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
Just seems like a huge pain to build with.
Hardly, there are several cases on the market today compatible with these kinds of boards and more are comingEasiest builds I have ever done.
Ive been advocating this to be the new standard for a reason.Holy brain rot
As such, there's only so much the board makers can do on their side and as you point out, the memory controller is inside the CPU package and the IOD is said to remain largely unchanged for the 9000-series.
Personally, I wouldn't waste the money on a new motherboard, unless USB4 is a must have feature.
Im not an engineer at AMD, but i do do layout at another company on DDR controllers. If they designed the controller for a target sweet spot of 6400 without changing any gates/rtl, they did layout (especially cts), timing closure and clk/data skew alignment at that target frequency which is totally possible. 400mhz isnt that big of a bump.
If you want really high memory speeds with DDR5, memory modules a CKD is most likely going to be the way to go anyhow and then latencies will go up.
I honestly believe there will be minimal benefits to be had from throwing away your motherboard.
ascii.jp/elem/000/004/209/4209271/
When testing on my b650 strix e, 8000 would run for 8+ hours in kahru without errors, then last 10 seconds the next boot.
If I were buying an AM5 build I would absolutely wait for more leaks on X870E before deciding between 600 and 800 gen boards.
*6200-6400 is also attainable on Zen4, which gives me hope they’re sandbagging the real sweet-spot for enthusiasts. It’s entirely possible 6600-6800 could be viable in 1:1.
Unless you have proof otherwise. Also, what’s the point of singling that out, that was the least relevant part of the entire post.
I'm sorry you were unable to get one, but as I said, piss poor management is who you want to blame, not some poor customer service people.
A lot of people at Gigabyte were disappointed that the board wasn't more widely available as well.
The only two people ive spoken with that own or I’ve seen with the board are wdm (on OCN who tests boards for gigabyte) or Buildzoid, both who have mentioned the board was not available for purchase and was sent to them by Gigabyte.
I don’t blame CS for anything, it’s not their fault, they simply never had that information to give; which more than likely means the board was never listed for sale in the US.
You don't make retail products as a company if you're not going to sell the product. I don't work for Gigabyte, so I don't know which retail they sold them through, but as I said, it was a really limited run of a few hundred boards, most went to Japan.
The reason you weren't told, was due to how bad their sales people are. Due to them being unable to figure out how to sell these boards into the channel, there was a as I've mentioned, a very small amount of boards made. However, it was sold in retail at one point.