Time to buy AM4 platform

Black Friday is coming and if you want to buy anything on AM4 platform I can watch this video to pick up motherboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti38JS8RuPU

Just keep in mind that he is looking at motherboard from overclocking point of view. But if he says avoid this motherboard, then you should avoid it. Specially for B450 chipset.

In my opinion $160 is top for motherboards for regular folks who does not to do heavy overclocking. My last motherboard was B450 GAMING PRO CARBON AC and I’m quite happy with it. It did cost $129 and was really happy that I decided to buy it from Newegg because even 15 months later this motherboard cost $139. It has nice audio track even I’m not that kind of guy who can tell a difference. Also, it has Intel LAN and Wifi but honestly, I always had Realtek LAN and never had any problems and as result I don’t see any difference. Lastly it has BIOS flashback, so you can flash it without CPU, memory and video card and this is a really nice thing.

Another good motherboard I’m considering buying is B450 TOMAHAWK MAX ($114). It is the same as B450 TOMAHAWK, just has bigger BIOS chip. It is not big problem at all but considering $4 price difference I would buy MAX version.

2000 series of AMD CPU’s are on huge discount. You can buy AMD Ryzen 5 2600 for $118. With Patriot Viper 4 Series Extreme Performance DDR4 16GB (2 X 8GB) 3200MHz Kit (PC4-25600) PV416G320C6K you can buy Motherboard + CPU + Memory for about $292 (before tax). And these are not just cheapest part I found. You can get way cheaper. These parts are good middle end and you can even buy top AMD CPU for AM4 platform and it will run it without any problem (unless you will overclock it). If you think upgrading your old computer, it is right time. Just wait when Black Friday actually starts. And later you can sell your old parts on eBay and perhaps can get another $50-$100 from it.

I would not recommend Intel platform unless you have money to burn. AMD AM4 platform already allows you to have 3 different CPU generations without any problem. Even B350 motherboards can run latest and greatest CPU. Intel just don’t care and as result owning Intel platform is more expensive. Every CPU will require new motherboard and Intel motherboards are not cheap. Yes, Intel CPU’s in generally faster in games but they offer less cores and it is where world is going. And even now everything is fine, new games will use more and more cores as well as other applications. And for productive applications AMD generally faster. Lastly more and more security issues found on Intel platform and every patch makes it little bit slower.