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
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I’m looking forward to any kind of memory/IF improvements. Won’t be too long now, hoping that 2400mhz IF rumor is true or even semi viable as it opens up some fun opportunities for overclocking. MSI ASUS and Gigabyte all need to step up this generation, even a Formula from ASRock would be neat.
With 64GB memory kits widely available now, those 1 DPC boards are pretty viable and I wonder why more manufacturers aren't making them. The vast majority of people use 2 slots anyway.
This case wont work? This is the 6500X. All the Corsair cases on the list work with rear connect boards.
There are other cases from Asus, MSI, and few newer Phanteks too that arent on that list that are made specifically for these kinds of boards too
I mean you buy one now and in two years, you can't upgrade or replace your case or motherboard because everything changed !!
(not talking about the backside connectors)
You raising the price of the board by adding extra complication and circuitry. You adding extra incompatibility in certain use cases - e.g.: cannot put old board which is no longer used for "GAMING" to work in different case, say as storage home server on the cheap. No workstation/server case can fit board like this. On top of this this whole worthless bloat. Waste of resources.
I support interesting innovation - example: adding extra pinouts slots to x16 PCIe for power hungry GPUs (like Asus showed couple years ago and it was DoA). This backward ports idea is completely pointless. Even few WS boards who had M.2 at the back - perfect place to fry your NAND, even at Gen.3.
Aren't expensive headsets with built-in ALC 1200/4080 and not using the motherboard's codec?