Wednesday, January 1st 2025

ASUS Drops Sneak Peek of Upcoming AMD AM5 Motherboards

Earlier today, ASUS uploaded a first sneak peek of several upcoming AMD AM5 motherboards—which we assume will feature the B850 and B840 chipsets—which according to the post on Facebook, will be launching within a couple of weeks. The boards will most likely be on display at CES, which kicks off on the 7th of January. The picture is obfuscated for obvious reasons, but what is clear is that there will be several different SKUs from all of ASUS' typical sub-brands such as TUF Gaming and ROG.

What we can also make out is that there will be at least one Mini-ITX board and one micro-ATX board, with the latter being the TUF Gaming branded board. We tried to clean up the picture a bit, but ASUS has managed to hide all details of possible models names and most of the text is kind of hard to make out. Nothing really sticks out in terms of features, although it's clear we'll end up seeing some higher-end B850 boards, judging by the fact that there are at least three ROG Strix SKUs coming. The question is if there's a market for these boards, considering the B850 chipset is pretty much the same as the B650E chipset, but with optional PCIe 5.0 support for the M.2 slots and no USB4, unlike its X870 counterpart.

Update Jan 1st: ASUS posted a picture of their upcoming mid-range Intel boards on Facebook as well, but as with the AMD boards, ASUS obfuscated the image, although not quite as badly this time around. For its Intel lineup, there's also a lower-end Prime board included, in addition to the TUF Gaming and ROG Strix boards. ASUS didn't reveal any launch window for the Intel boards.
Source: ASUS on Facebook
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42 Comments on ASUS Drops Sneak Peek of Upcoming AMD AM5 Motherboards

#26
kapone32
NellyASUS the company that doesn't give a crap about peoples warranty for their over priced products, well same goes for MSI. Maybe they are all crap?
I had a MSI X570S that had issues. While the board was being sent back, they had already dispatched a new board. Maybe they have once again gone back to their desultory ways.
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#27
Chaitanya
TheLostSwedeAsus have pretty ok service centres in Taiwan, as long as you don't take a monitor there...
Ended up with failed internal power board, which they swapped, but the engineer was sloppy and introduced dust behind the display panel, so they had to swap that out and the new panel failed again within the warranty period, so they swapped it again, only for the new panel to develop a similar ghosting issue that the panel started to have after a year...
The router that failed got swapped for a new one sealed in the box, if only they hadn't EOL:ed it less than a year later, despite being a recent AX model...
Over here in India, its quite opposite with Asus who have terrible reputation and depending on product range service centers are run by different companies with RpTech essentially being the scummiest of the lot. Gigabyte next in line when it comes to sloppy after sale service with a lot of complaints from users. MSI is a little better(for motherboards atleast) as its operated by distributor and seems to be the most responsive to user complaints but given near constant changes to distribution network of MSI(Gigabyte and Asus both have stuck with same distributors for decades at this point while MSI keeps changing distributors) who knows how long this arrangement will last.
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#28
TheLostSwede
News Editor
ChaitanyaOver here in India, its quite opposite with Asus who have terrible reputation and depending on product range service centers are run by different companies with RpTech essentially being the scummiest of the lot. Gigabyte next in line when it comes to sloppy after sale service with a lot of complaints from users. MSI is a little better(for motherboards atleast) as its operated by distributor and seems to be the most responsive to user complaints but given near constant changes to distribution network of MSI(Gigabyte and Asus both have stuck with same distributors for decades at this point while MSI keeps changing distributors) who knows how long this arrangement will last.
I guess the difference is that in Taiwan, these companies run their own service centres. Never had to go to an MSI one, but Gigabyte swapped out the thermal pads and TIM on my GTX 1080, as the fans had started to go nuts when I was gaming and that seemed to have resolved the issue. It was all free of charge as well, since it was within the warranty period.

Keep in mind that a lot of these companies work based on relationships, so if they're happy with the sales numbers of the distributors, they tend to stick with them.
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#29
_roman_
WirkoIf there are zero electrical lanes then yeah, sure. But otherwise? PCIe hardware has always had excellent compatibility between generations and differing lane counts.
... but otherwise ... (a small selection)

Will these product work on a PCIE 3.0 one lane slot for 4x M2 NVME?
www.asus.com/support/faq/1037507/


Will both m2 nvme work wiht a pice 3.0 one lane slot?
www.techpowerup.com/330133/maxsun-arc-b580-graphics-card-with-two-m-2-slots-pictured-in-the-flesh

I highly doubt it.
Posted on Reply
#30
ymdhis
_roman_Will both m2 nvme work wiht a pice 3.0 one lane slot?
www.techpowerup.com/330133/maxsun-arc-b580-graphics-card-with-two-m-2-slots-pictured-in-the-flesh

I highly doubt it.
That would require bifurcation, ie. lane splitting, so obviously it would not work. You can't split a x16 line into a x8 + x4 + x4 line if the card it plugged into a x1 slot - the first x8 part will run at x1 speed and that's that. Likewise, if you use an AMD Phoenix CPU, which makes only x8 lines available for the primary PCIE slot, then you can't split it either. You could at best split it to x4x4x4x4 and use the first two x4 slots, but that card is most likely configured as x8x4x4, so you can't do it.

Like that guy above you said - if the physical lines are missing, you can't do anything about that.
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#31
Knight47
TheLostSwedeMost likely due to not enough PCIe lanes.

There are enough lanes for 3 nvme and one x4 slot without sharing lanes, just look at the Asrock B650E Steel Legend for example www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/B650E Steel Legend WiFi/#Specification

You could even do 4-5 nvme slots without needing two chipsets. If you halve gpu bandwidth like on B650E-E you could do 7 Nvme slots and 9 on dual chipset, meanwhile AMD is stuck on 4(or 3 thanks to USB4 bs) while Intel can do 7.
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#32
chstamos
Coming from the GPU threads, I thought people will buy the dominant player no matter what, no matter how good or how great value for money a product, it's all just a waste of resources developing worthwhile products and everything is the consumer's fault. So how come AMD is going from strength to strength on the cpu market?

PS: Sorry if the above sounds a bit rage-baity, but all I'm trying to say is that releasing a great product delivers results, AMD's exceptional cpu division is proof of that, and we should tone it down we the "sheeple" rhetoric.
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#33
DaemonForce
I don't really see much interest coming from X570 and trying to compact features to make better use of lanes.
I just need:
M.2 g4x4
PCIE g4x16
M.2 g4x4
PCIE g4x4
Maybe 2xSATA

The rest is cake. That's 20...Maybe 24 lanes max. I do that now. How do you romance AM4 users into AM5?
Posted on Reply
#34
freeagent
DaemonForceHow do you romance AM4 users into AM5?
Outside of having the latest and greatest just to enjoy.. I would say either Zen 6, or AM6.

Edit:

And I still want a 5950X.. even though I have 5900X, 5800X3D, and 5600X.
Posted on Reply
#35
Shou Miko
_roman_... but otherwise ... (a small selection)

Will these product work on a PCIE 3.0 one lane slot for 4x M2 NVME?
www.asus.com/support/faq/1037507/


Will both m2 nvme work wiht a pice 3.0 one lane slot?
www.techpowerup.com/330133/maxsun-arc-b580-graphics-card-with-two-m-2-slots-pictured-in-the-flesh

I highly doubt it.
You need a motherboard with bifurcation support to get this working if I am not wrong because we seen this with Asus' RTX 4060 Ti Dual with M.2. in order to get M.2. working your motherboard will have to support bifurcation: www.techpowerup.com/review/asus-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-dual-with-m-2-slot/

List of motherboards with PCIe Bifurcation support: techytone.com/pcie-bifurcation-motherboard-list-complete-guide/

Maybe @TheLostSwede knows if there is another way maybe with a chip do something fancy things instead of motherboard support?
TheLostSwedeMost likely due to not enough PCIe lanes.

Didn't motherboard vendor cut down on SATA ports to avoid having users to choose between using 2xSATA ports, M.2. or PCI-E x4 port? or I am I just too old?:laugh:
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#36
KillSwitx
Hmmmmmm ... x870e Apex anyone? From other community, there may be a couple of users already testing it ... which it would be great :D
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#37
_roman_
The point is those hardware will not work wiht one lane most likely. Am I wrong?
I did not talk about bifurcation. That bifurcation website from ASUS i mentioned, seems to use many, many, many pcie express lanes per slot + uefi settings.
I mentioned the use case, one pcie express 3 lane. Regardless of the bandwidth limitations for the graphic card and those two m2 nvme on that graphic card. (In response to the "claim" - "statement" I quoted)

I do not have that graphic card with two m2 nvme on it to test it. I do not have a mechanical 16 lane slot with only one electrical pcie express lane.
Posted on Reply
#38
Shou Miko
_roman_The point is those hardware will not work wiht one lane most likely. Am I wrong?
I did not talk about bifurcation. That bifurcation website from ASUS i mentioned, seems to use many, many, many pcie express lanes per slot + uefi settings.
I mentioned the use case, one pcie express 3 lane. Regardless of the bandwidth limitations for the graphic card and those two m2 nvme on that graphic card. (In response to the "claim" - "statement" I quoted)

I do not have that graphic card with two m2 nvme on it to test it. I do not have a mechanical 16 lane slot with only one electrical pcie express lane.
I just said what was required to make the onboard m.2. works on gfx nothing else :D
Posted on Reply
#39
Wirko
_roman_The point is those hardware will not work wiht one lane most likely. Am I wrong?
I did not talk about bifurcation. That bifurcation website from ASUS i mentioned, seems to use many, many, many pcie express lanes per slot + uefi settings.
I mentioned the use case, one pcie express 3 lane. Regardless of the bandwidth limitations for the graphic card and those two m2 nvme on that graphic card. (In response to the "claim" - "statement" I quoted)

I do not have that graphic card with two m2 nvme on it to test it. I do not have a mechanical 16 lane slot with only one electrical pcie express lane.
One PCIe device requires one PCIe link, 3 or 4 devices require 3 or 4 links, a link consists of at least one lane. The examples you gave are made up of 3 or 4 separate devices on a single x16 card without a PCIe switch chip. Therefore one will connect and the others won't. PCIe backwards compatibility is still excellent because one link can be established over a single Gen 1 lane.
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#40
ymdhis
_roman_The point is those hardware will not work wiht one lane most likely. Am I wrong?
I did not talk about bifurcation. That bifurcation website from ASUS i mentioned, seems to use many, many, many pcie express lanes per slot + uefi settings.
I mentioned the use case, one pcie express 3 lane. Regardless of the bandwidth limitations for the graphic card and those two m2 nvme on that graphic card. (In response to the "claim" - "statement" I quoted)

I do not have that graphic card with two m2 nvme on it to test it. I do not have a mechanical 16 lane slot with only one electrical pcie express lane.
You are wrong. The card you linked to is 3 devices in one card, and the only way you can use all 3 is to have a board that supports bifurcation - it is designed with that in mind. Otherwise it is not possible to split the x16 lane to x8x4x4 configuration (for the gpu, m.2, m.2 respectively).

What you are thinking of is one of those m.2 raid cards that exposes itself as one device but internally uses 4x m.2 NVMe ports. Those will work in x1 mode (with speed reduction), but that's because the motherboard is talking to the controller chip on the card, not the NVMe drives directly. With the bifurcation cards, there's no such controller, the motherboard talks directly to the separate devices, hence why it requires bifurcation.
Posted on Reply
#41
Nelly
ChaitanyaOver here in India, its quite opposite with Asus who have terrible reputation and depending on product range service centers are run by different companies with RpTech essentially being the scummiest of the lot. Gigabyte next in line when it comes to sloppy after sale service with a lot of complaints from users. MSI is a little better(for motherboards atleast) as its operated by distributor and seems to be the most responsive to user complaints but given near constant changes to distribution network of MSI(Gigabyte and Asus both have stuck with same distributors for decades at this point while MSI keeps changing distributors) who knows how long this arrangement will last.
In the UK . . .

Gigabyte - UK RMA base since as long as I remember, usually pretty good in my experience. They recently moved to a new facility in England, same city.
ASRock - Netherlands RMA base, read good reports, usually Peter Fest sorts out RMAs, although not sure if he's retired now.
MSI - Used to go to Netherlands, now its Poland and they are abysmal having read various threads.
ASUS - They will always tell you to RMA through the retailer, always read that RMA's are still not done in over 6+ weeks.

ABIT - Used to be UK RMA base, pretty quick turnaround when they was still around.
Posted on Reply
#42
Shou Miko
NellyIn the UK . . .

Gigabyte - UK RMA base since as long as I remember, usually pretty good in my experience. They recently moved to a new facility in England, same city.
ASRock - Netherlands RMA base, read good reports, usually Peter Fest sorts out RMAs, although not sure if he's retired now.
MSI - Used to go to Netherlands, now its Poland and they are abysmal having read various threads.
ASUS - They will always tell you to RMA through the retailer, always read that RMA's are still not done in over 6+ weeks.

ABIT - Used to be UK RMA base, pretty quick turnaround when they was still around.
I know that for Asus in Nordic (DK, SE, NO Properly also Finland) Asus RMA use to be top tier but it's broken, slow and not really helpful at all my last encounter directly with Asus Nordic was with a 4K 144Hz monitor with the price tag of £779 and their support just refused to help or guide me the first email was just denied when I had G-Sync crashes with this expensive monitor, and they didn't knew anything until my third email the support said he needed to contact Asus Germany for help :banghead:

Also here no help, I managed through from of my own channels to find out that the monitor had a swap warranty so I used this one and got a working monitor but still support can be better.

Gigabyte support Global wasn't really a good when I had their Z590 Aero G board I had memory stability issues even with no XMP enabled and they blamed the ddr4 memory worked perfectly fine with Asus, AsRock and MSI boards even on am4 and the Geil memory wasn't even supported on am4.

Seagate RMA is the buttom of worst, it took me half a year to get a RMA case made for my Exos 16TB disk first had to fine a browser that supported their chat and I had to use 3 different computeres 2 with Windows 11 and 1 with Windows 10 Pro and it's really random and this is a huge topic on the internet that you can try different browser across several systems and the chat button won't load with or without any add blocking. I was so lucky that Microsoft Edge worked on my computer at work with Windows 10 Pro since I was unable to make a RMA case myself in their portal.

A side note the 3 agents with Seagate wanted me as a EU citizen to apply to US Law all the time WTF is actually up with this anyone know? is it because their headquarters are located in the US or?


The best RMA I have had was with ASRock Global actually not even their EU devision I had a problem with one of their boards they sendt me a bios for was it their Z370 Taichi if I remember correct that fixed my issue they even took a request from their forum where a user asked if it was possible to turn off all the fancy lightning throw the bios and made it a feature in a beta bios and kept it afterwards that's why to this date I want to keep using AsRock as much as I can since they make good boards for a really good price.
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