> The average AMD 400 Series motherboard has key technical advantages over the average AMD 300 Series motherboard, including: VRM configuration, memory trace to

> The average AMD 400 Series motherboard has key technical advantages over the average AMD 300 Series motherboard, including: VRM configuration, memory trace topology, and PCB layers So AMD told you that? And yet you don't call that market segmentation? Come on now. Lose the double standard already. AsRock (and I think Asus or Gigabyte?) has proven the b350/x370 chipset works fine with 5000 series CPUs. People have tested it and are using it just fine. VRMs are up to the motherboard. Why are you letting AMD dictate what motherboard manufacturers want to support here? > look at the quality of the average X370 motherboard compared to 400+ Uh, what? The x370 is at a higher tier than b450. There are many b450 boards that are straight garbage (and let's be honest, garbage MBs stretch across all chipsets). The difference between a b350 and b450 is vanishingly tiny. I'm baffled that people really think 300/400/500 series matter. You can run Zen 1 on b550/x570 despite AMD not wanting you to. You can't claim VRM/memory trace/PCB there. The only real limitation that I can tell is physical BIOS RAM capacity. > Which Ryzen model doesn't have SMT? The Ryzen 3, of course. Not that I meant literally all the steps Intel took AMD also took. But what the hell do you think the "X" series of Ryzen chips are? Or Threadripper and EPYC? It's all market segmentation. The Ryzen 5 is just the 7 with cores disabled. Why are you picking certain features as "segmentation" over others? It makes no sense. > As for ECC: I don't believe I said they're perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than what Intel has to offer... How? Just so you know I spent literally months researching everything I've stated in this thread just so I could put together a Ryzen system with ECC. With Xeon I could have been done in a day. Gigabyte allows ECC RAM to operate, but forces it into non-ECC mode thereby working as normal RAM. Good luck figuring out what MSI is doing. Asus, who the hell really knows. Their website spec sheet lists "ECC supported" and the manual for each specific motherboard says something entirely different.