This B650 motherboard has an RS232 port

[DanceswithUnix]

A quick update in case anyone is interested...

I've been very impressed with the 7900 (non X), just the sheer grunt you get out of a 65W TDP (88W actual upper limit) power draw compared to my 5900X daily drive. But there are wrinkles.

I've plugged in an NVMe boot drive, and three SATA drives so this thing can run VMs. It has one SATA port spare, and two empty NVMe ports. If I ever want to stuff the box with SSDs (which might happen) I will need a SATA card pretty fast.

So instead of SATA ports, this thing has three NVMe slots, so I have two of those left. That's 12 lanes of PCIe for NVMe on an IO limited platform. The motherboard feels a bit expansion slot deprived compared to the old X470/X570 boards in the same price range as this B650.

The integrated graphics has been a huge plus here. If I want to plug in a 2 port 25GbE network card (quite likely) then I can use the video card slot. The other x16 slot is actually a x4 electrical connection. Now x4 is usually enough, so I think I'm good.

That initial boot was nail biting. Thankfully I had heard that DDR5 boards can take minutes to do an initial ram training, so I just waited and it came up just fine.

One thing I wish I had read before I ordered: This board does not currently support ECC ram. The ASUS spec sheet says it does, and the ram works just fine, but right now there is apparently an AGEASA issue that stops sideband ECC from working and ASUS are waiting for AMD to fix it. That's unfortunate, but then DDR5 has die ECC as part of the standard and that should be working just fine so I'm partly covered. Just if correct data leaves the DDR stick and gets glitched on the way to the CPU that won't currently get detected. I'll keep the machine, and hopefully at some point the BIOS will get an upgrade. This is why you usually ignore a new platform for work machines

Then there is the SSDs. I installed them, and then stuffed a copy of Windows 10 Pro (early 2020 edition, it's what I had handy) on there to update the SSD firmware. The WD NVMe drive updated just fine. The MX500 SATA drives all refused. After some mucking about, including an upgrade to Windows 11 and then uninstalling the WD utility and re-installing the Crucial utility it updated two of the three SATA ssds. I pulled the drive on SATA 2, stuck it in my workstation and updated it there first go. Again, feels like a new platform issue. Support from Crucial was a standard form reply most of which was meaningless on a machine which had a fresh Windows install and only the SSD update utility put on it.

The integrated graphics is surprisingly good at running Minecraft. I mean, Java edition set to full quality and maximum render distance. I had to set vsync to off as it was dropping to about 58fps which with vsync on gave me a 30fps result on the old 60Hz TV I was using as a monitor for testing the build.

[Saracen999]

Interestimg.

It certainly looks like the 7900 did a good job of undermining the 7900X, at least at initial pricing. But then, I note the 7900X has dropped from £595 when I first priced up a prospective spec, to £440. That's ... not tiny.

I'm currently (surprising, I know) waiting for 7900X3D, and for that matter, 7800X3D benchmarks, and wide availability. I'm currenly leaning towards 7800X3D, but we'll see. Mine, if/when, isn't a work machine and ECC doesn't worry me unduly. It's a combined gaming/'creator' machine, for strictly non-professional, non-commercial use.

Integrated graphics looks fine, but I'm after the hardware acceleration on video encoding, and while still not sure, probably RTX 7900XT, for AV1. Not cheap, but I'm not sure I can see much benefit (to me) in the XTX.

I'm still .... contemplating. But getting closer to crunch.

[DanceswithUnix]

Another update, partly in case anyone's Google search brings them here but a few locals might be interested

So the latest BIOS update is out and installed, and that now means I have ECC capability in the BIOS and I should have the feature we paid all that money for. Yay!

Not quite plain sailing yet:

# edac-util -v
edac-util: Error: No memory controller data found.

so no kernel support, that's on kernel 6.1.14-200.fc37.x86_64. Given the hardware didn't work until weeks ago, that isn't suprising. It is also why I installed Fedora Server on this machine, as that's kept as close to bleeding edge of kernels as I would want a machine that needs to work for its living.