Mid-January Launches for AMD B850 and B840; and Intel B860 and H810 Motherboards

[_roman_]

It's a line output, just an audio signal, not meant to be powering anything.
But the noise floor, hiss and hum is usually bad enough that you can never get a clean sound at lower volumes even if you plug it into a good amplifier. That's why you want to run the signal digital and at 100% volume into the DAC/preamp, and then adjust the volume to get low noise and "high resolution".

I think you mix up some things.

Those outputs from a pc sound card, except the line out output, are able to drive high ohm speakers like headsets. High ohm in terms of speakers are 32 ohm for headsets for example.

In my case - I think some audio distortion happens because of the bad circuit design of asus mainboard. I do not care why. It's a fact ASUS mainboard sound card does not work properly

Using a battery driven smartphone 3.5mm output the audio signal is fine on the external speakers. That was the reason I went with the gamble and the usb audio interface. The problem was than solved. The battery driven smartphone is not connected with the 230V AC line which I suspect causing those distortions. A soundcard which can not be used with my active speakers shows how crappy my asus mainbaord is. I also noted that cheap entry speakers from presonus do not have the pe wire. Most likely the distortions come from the pe. Which I can not verify without measurement equipment.
Note pe is the third wire from the wall socket (phase + neutral + pe)

Considering the usb audio interface is powered by the active usb hub from my monitor which is all basically connected to the same wall socket. Monitor + Speaker + Speaker + PSU for my Computer.

Windows and Linux, all brands; Samsung, Kingston, SandDisk, Intel(back in the days), etc.

I have reduced a lot the writes to my ssds over the years for my gentoo installation from 2006.
as a starting point: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Tmpfs

system downloads are on a "defective" with read errors hdd. As they are downloaded once and have a checksum.

Less important files on my / implies smaller backups

I do consider SSDs after 2 years as old. I replace SSDs before 2 years are reached.

I'm sure my gaming only windows 11 pro abuses my KC3000 system drive more as my gentoo linux which also resides on that drive.

why you want to run the signal digital and at 100% volume into the DAC/preamp

May I ask you to read a mainboard manual first.

I can tell you my previous MSI b550 gaming edge wifi mainboard manual explains very well in detail how to connect a mainboard soundcard. How many connections are there and such. I think you mix something up.

I think you may also read about active and passive speakers. You mix up something.

I wrote I have active speakers. I do not need a preamp with active speakers.

 

[LabRat 891]

short: some people have already two older m2 ssds.

I do too; 4x Solidigm P41+ 2TBs, a Sabrent Rocket 4 1TB, and a P1600X 118GB.

I sold my AM4 B550 mainboard for the buggy INTEL WIFI module which crashed the hole machine, turbo boost amd agesa - msi mainboard bug and for the lack of m2 nvme slots.
B550 chipset can only do 4 lanes pcie 4.0 nvme and another 4 lane pcie 3.0 nvme. I started with a 1tb pcie 4 nvme. than i bought another 1tb pcie 4.0 nvme.
At the time i bought those 1TB NVME was very expensive. Two 1tB NVME had cost me as much as one Ryzen 5800X I had (the second one i bought for that price).

There was no space left for another m2 nvme on that mainboard. Pcie 3.0 was dated for the m2 slot. Intel wlan annoyed me. The lack of the turbo boost annoyed me. (Found much later, that it was fixed much much later with a agesa update)

Sadly some newer AMD mainboard these days have pcie 3.0 again for the m2 slot.

We had high prices for cpus, dram, ssds, gpus. But we had affordable mainboards and power supplies.

On my X570 AM4 build, I have 4 P41+s in an 8-lane Gen3 -> 4x4 M.2 M-key switched expander. It was ~$100 used. Gen3 only, but it works for my needs (bulk low-latency storage)
I actually bought a non-WiFi ver. of my AM4 board for a wi-fi-less rebuild in a classic Alu. Lian-Li.

you mean x670, right? the second chipset gives you additional expansion slots.

I'd prefer that, yes. But most X670 boards send those lanes to M.2s, not PCIe slots. I've seen more B650 boards w/ expansion closer to my needs.

Not everyone has a small formfactor build with itx mainboard, 1 ram module, 1 graphic card, 1 nvme. That's perfectly fine for many, but not for everyone.

People are probably moving from SATA to m2. 4tb nvme is kinda affordable these days

Hence, my desire for expansion slots over M.2s.
Since, AMD (and board partners) support bifurcation fairly well, PCIe slots are easily and very affordably adaptable to M.2 using passive non-switched M.2 PCIe expanders.

As someone who wants 4 M.2 SSD's in his computer I respectfully disagree.

As someone with more than 4 M.2 SSDs in his machine, and a need for PCIe slots, I heartily disagree.

 

[BR4INIAC]

I'm really looking forward to these new releases. I know most users prefer AMD but I've always liked Intel better.
For a few months now I have been upgrading my OLD workstation and I am waiting for everything that comes out of the new generation.
I'm not (too) worried about getting high prices for things that are actually worth it. However, I am aware of always maintaining the price-quality ratio, Taking into account what I really need. So these new boards with B860 chips are very useful for me. I have already got my new Intel Core ultra processor and I have considered combining it with one of the z890s that have already been released, But since I don't need overclocking or so many advanced features, if they have better prices, that will be a big relief for my wallet XD haha.Regarding connections (which I see more debated on this topic) I'm fine as long as they have enough SATA for my backup drives, but if not, I'm sure I'll be fine with an expansion card or something

 

[Random_User]

Why is everyone asking for more M.2 slots?
Y'all realize AMD has broad PCIe bifurcation support and that passive (un-switched) Gen3, Gen4, and often even Gen5 M.2-PCIe adapter-expanders are *very* affordable ($20-50), right?

If I ever upgrade to AM5, at this rate, I'll be stuck w/ an old B650 board, just for expansion...
-PCIe x16 RX 7900 GRE
-PCIe x1 Asus Xonar Essence STX
-PCIe x4/x8 Active (switched) M.2x4 Expander
-PCIe x4/x8 Intel dual 10Gbase-T card
More x4, x8 and x16 slots, plox and spank you.

Indeed. Or just buy the cheap x2- x4 m.2 PCIE expansion card, and call it a day. Still better airflow, than suffocating under the 3-4 slot furnace bricks.

 

[Aleksandar_038]

As someone who wants 4 M.2 SSD's in his computer I respectfully disagree.

And you think it is good idea to put them all on mobo, then cover them with hot graphic card, then spend hundreds of bucks to cool them properly?

One M2 slot on board, rest of lanes into PCIe, then you put M2s onto PCIe adapters - full flexibility, better cooling...

It waa principle from the 80s onwards, but somewhere we took completely wrong turn.

 

[efikkan]

Less important files on my / implies smaller backups

It does, it also makes it easy to reinstall (or roll back which it seems like you do).
I have 5 systems to maintain at home (2 dual-boot, 3 Linux only), and I try to keep it as simple as possible. If an upgrade messes up a system and I can't resolve it with minial effort, I just reinstall it (at least for Linux), it takes me 20-30 min. with some script to get it up and running. For my next workstation build I will probably consider having regular snapshots of / too. (I have / and /home as separate partitions, but /home is just a scratch space, so the worst I'll lose there would be browser history).

I do consider SSDs after 2 years as old. I replace SSDs before 2 years are reached.

I'm sure my gaming only windows 11 pro abuses my KC3000 system drive more as my gentoo linux which also resides on that drive.

I consider consumer SSDs pretty much disposable, and 2-3 years of heavy use is pretty much aligned with what I've seen over the years. Back when I used to work in a larger office with developers, "faulty" SSDs were the number 1 reason for stability issues and premature failure. It's so prevalent that it's become one of the first things I check when diagnosis systems.

Whether it's abuse or not, is probably debatable. The characteristics of SSDs has enabled software to do lots of more IO operations, a lot of that is useful, but probably a lot of that is "bloat" or moving stuff out of memory.

Regardless, I usually diagnose my drives multiple times a year, and replace them at the first sign of errors (if not before).

May I ask you to read a mainboard manual first.

We are evidently talking past each other.
I'll try a more simple example and see if you get it, if not, let it be;
Not too long ago, I was wondering if my very expensive DAC/preamp DacMagic Plus was broken, as it sounded awful, low volume and had terrible audio quality (using studio-grade AKG K271 MKII), turned out the OS had turned down the sound volume extremely low (probably a software update), turning it back up to 100% and turning down the preamp made the sound clean again. For those who know how signal processing works it should be obvious why.

The same holds true for both digital and analog signals, although the consequences are different. Digital ones lose resolution, while analog ones mainly suffer from noise. Any time there is some kind of amplification involved, you want to run a strong clean signal into it. This is especially noticeable for someone connecting powerful speakers to their PC; most of the time they probably will be listening at music or podcasts at low volume (e.g. 5-10% volume), doing so at low volume from the PC will result in very low quality sound.

On my X570 AM4 build, I have 4 P41+s in an 8-lane Gen3 -> 4x4 M.2 M-key switched expander.

In RAID 0?
You might want to consider a single IO optimized enterprise SSD from Solidigm, Kioxia, etc. next time, as those will have much better sustained performance vs. just fast burst speed.

As someone with more than 4 M.2 SSDs in his machine, and a need for PCIe slots, I heartily disagree.

Threadripper or Xeon W should probably be considered next time, especially now that "well featured" mainstream boards are priced in the same territory.
Having lots of PCIe lanes and throwing in lots of RAM is what I want for my next build(s).

 

[LabRat 891]

In RAID 0?

no.

Threadripper or Xeon W should probably be considered next time, especially now that "well featured" mainstream boards are priced in the same territory.
Having lots of PCIe lanes and throwing in lots of RAM is what I want for my next build(s).

X570 had been sufficient. We've gone backwards since, in exposed expansion.

 

[Tek-Check]

Really hope AMD has an integrated USb4 controller in the next generation of Zen CPUs. I was really hoping to see USB4 being a requirement if B850. I understand that a discrete solution adds significant cost, so integrating it into the SoC could solve that (so long as the real estate it takes up on the silicon isn't "too expensive" per mm^2).

Yep. They have had USB4 controller integrated in APUs since Rembrandt 6000, with two PHYs for two 40 Gbps ports. They use half of silicon space for this than Intel uses for USB-C sub-system with four PHYs for Thunderbolt 4.

A new IOD for Zen6 should have integrated USB4, just like Arrow Lake S has integrated two Thunderbolt 4 ports. This would allow a lot of flexibility for motherboard vendors.