MSI Intros PRO B650-A WIFI Motherboard

[btarunr]

MSI introduced the PRO B650-A WIFI, a feature-rich entry-mainstream Socket AM5 motherboard under its PRO series. Built in the standard ATX form-factor, the board features a 6-layer PCB, and includes heatsinks for all its M.2 slots, The board draws power from a 24-pin ATX and two 8-pin EPS power connectors and uses a 14+2+1 phase VRM solution that's capable of even the top 170 W TDP Ryzen 9 chips. The CPU socket is wired to four DDR5 DIMM slots, a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot, and two M.2 NVMe Gen 4 slots. The board's third M.2 Gen 4 slot is wired to the B650 FCH.

The MSI PRO B650-A WIFI offers a fairly premium onboard audio solution driven by a Realtek ALC4080 CODEC. USB connectivity includes a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 type-C port, three 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 type-A, four 5 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 1, and a few USB 3.2 and USB 2.0 ports by internal headers. Display outputs include HDMI and DisplayPort. Networking connectivity includes a 2.5 GbE interface driven by a Realtek 8125B controller, and an AMD/Mediatek sourced WLAN module with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Besides the three M.2 Gen 4 slots, you get four SATA 6 Gbps ports. The board supports USB BIOS Flashback. The company didn't reveal pricing.



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[Chaitanya]

Interesting there are new 600 series boards coming out while 800 series seems to be launching couple of months after 9000 series launch.

 

[Quicks]

"The company didn't reveal pricing."

The only part that matters with the overpriced M/B lately you can just as well wait for the 800 series and hope the price would be better.

 

[dj-electric]

"The company didn't reveal pricing."

The only part that matters with the overpriced M/B lately you can just as well wait for the 800 series and hope the price would be better.

Motherboard companies stopped putting pricing in PR posts simply because they don't want to commit to an MSRP anymore for how the market of parts and supply is behaving, and risk losing money

 

[holyprof]

Interesting alternative to the (most probably) even more expensive 800 series launching soon.
I don't care about gen 5 slots. I currently have gen X470 Gen 4 PCI-E MoBo (Gen.3 for the SSD) and don't think it's holding me back. It's the slow DDR4-3200 and outdated GPU + CPU, neither of which can sturate the gen PCI-E 4 slots. At the current state of things, you won't notice big, if any, difference between gen 4 and gen 5 unless running a SSD or extreme GPU limited (on a RTX4090) benchmarks.

 

[Knight47]

Interesting alternative to the (most probably) even more expensive 800 series launching soon.
I don't care about gen 5 slots. I currently have gen X470 Gen 4 PCI-E MoBo (Gen.3 for the SSD) and don't think it's holding me back. It's the slow DDR4-3200 and outdated GPU + CPU, neither of which can sturate the gen PCI-E 4 slots. At the current state of things, you won't notice big, if any, difference between gen 4 and gen 5 unless running a SSD or extreme GPU limited (on a RTX4090) benchmarks.

Didn't Amd remove support for Pcie Gen4 in 2019 on all B350/X370/B450/X470 boards?

MTT S80 is the only Gen5 gpu out there currently.

AMD RX 6500 XT PCIe 3.0 vs. 4.0 Tested

Up to 40% lower performance on PCIe 3.0.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[Kn0xxPT]

Interesting alternative to the (most probably) even more expensive 800 series launching soon.
I don't care about gen 5 slots. I currently have gen X470 Gen 4 PCI-E MoBo (Gen.3 for the SSD) and don't think it's holding me back. It's the slow DDR4-3200 and outdated GPU + CPU, neither of which can sturate the gen PCI-E 4 slots. At the current state of things, you won't notice big, if any, difference between gen 4 and gen 5 unless running a SSD or extreme GPU limited (on a RTX4090) benchmarks.

well .. PCIEgen4 SSD's are getting mainstream now ... being Pcie gen 5 the next evolution.. maybe we dont use the full extend of pcie4 or 5 ... but DirectStorage is getting mainstream, and with that, a fast SSD is a must, for future proof, Pcie5 M.2 slot motheboard I think is that right way to go for the upcoming years. I tested a Pcie4 SSD with 7000MBs transfer and is a snappy little beast ...
yet not all games are optimized for fast SSD's, thats why we dont see much diference in benchmarks.

 

[holyprof]

Didn't Amd remove support for Pcie Gen4 in 2019 on all B350/X370/B450/X470 boards?

MTT S80 is the only Gen5 gpu out there currently.

AMD RX 6500 XT PCIe 3.0 vs. 4.0 Tested

Up to 40% lower performance on PCIe 3.0.

www.tomshardware.com

Yes, you're right, but the 40% loss of performance is due to the PCI-E of the RX 6500 being only 4x instead of the usual x16. 4x PCI-E 4.0 has the same bandwidth as 16x PCI-E 2.0 (that's what my first modern era PC had back in 2008).

 

[sLowEnd]

"The company didn't reveal pricing."

The only part that matters with the overpriced M/B lately you can just as well wait for the 800 series and hope the price would be better.

MSI's "Pro" series boards for the past couple of generations have been pretty reasonably priced for their target market segment. I wouldn't expect this one to be different.

 

[Knight47]

Yes, you're right, but the 40% loss of performance is due to the PCI-E of the RX 6500 being only 4x instead of the usual x16. 4x PCI-E 4.0 has the same bandwidth as 16x PCI-E 2.0 (that's what my first modern era PC had back in 2008).

And/nvidia is cutting lanes for a long time, so if youre getting budget gpus it would be better to invest a bit more money into 5.0

 

[AleXXX666]

It looks like pricing will be OVERPRICE anyway...