Question MSI Tomahawk X670E worth the $80 extra?

[Dave3000]

I might be upgrading to a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and was wondering if the MSI Tomahawk X670E is worth the $80 extra over the MSI Tomahawk B650. I don't own any PCI-E 5.0 devices currently and probably won't for at least 2 more years. I only have a single 2TB PCI-E 4.0 NVMe installed as far as drives are concerned. I noticed that the MSI Tomahawk X670E uses the Realtek ALC1200 audio chip and the MSI Tomahawk B650 uses the Realtek ALC4080 audio chip. I understand that the ALC4080 uses the USB interface for audio even though it's internal and I heard that USB has more latency than PCI-E. I once tried a MSI Tomahawk X570S motherboard (wanted to replace my Asus B550 Strix Wi-Fi) that came with the ALC4080 audio chip and I had static and popping issues in the audio with that motherboard and ended up returning it for that reason. Is the ALC1200 better than the ALC4080? Does the ALC1200 use the USB inteface like the ALC4080?

 

[CP5670]

I have the X670E board and it's generally good for the price. It's currently $260 on newegg, which is only a $40 difference. The 4080 is a newer chip, but I doubt there is any noticeable quality or latency difference. It's best to use a soundcard or external receiver anyway if you want the best sound quality. X670E has more PCIE lanes in general with less bandwidth sharing between M.2 and PCIE slots.

 

[Dave3000]

I have the X670E board and it's generally good for the price. It's currently $260 on newegg, which is only a $40 difference. The 4080 is a newer chip, but I doubt there is any noticeable quality or latency difference. It's best to use a soundcard or external receiver anyway if you want the best sound quality. X670E has more PCIE lanes in general with less bandwidth sharing between M.2

I have a Soundblaster X-Fi PCI-E sound card stored away in the drawer but it's too old and it's not compatible with Windows 11 and stopped being supported by the manufacturer. I use Windows 11.

 

[CP5670]

You can use the Daniel K drivers. I still use an x-fi titanium HD with headphones and it works fine on 11.

 

[Dave3000]

I think I'll go for the MSI Tomahawk X670E as it's on sale right now at MC and the MSI Tomahawk B650 is still at it's regular price, so I think I spend the extra $60 for a more future proof and better I/O capabilities chipset.

 

[biostud]

I thought I would buy a B650E board, but in the end decided to go with the X670E, simply because the price difference is not that big, and since I hope I can upgrade to a Zen6 CPU in the future, then it would be really annoying to lack PCIe lanes to save a few $.