Hello @anon49550872
Both those boards are not cheap. I’m not not sure what you are looking at. I usually always buy ATX motherboards. I’m not into the micro ATX. I have my reasons and mostly it’s due to the fact that when they design the board the smaller it is something has to give. So you get less or the layout is just not as good and sometimes some boards just don’t work well. I have both in the MSI brand. The B550 i just picked up for another project down the road . I have the realtek chips on mine and i have another ASUS board which also has the realtek. I personally haven’t had any issues and i can use the r8168 or the r8169 module. If i’m using hibernate or suspend the r8169 is the one to use but typically i don’t so it doesn’t matter too much. The r8168 doesn’t like to wake back up for some reason. The 2.5 Gigabit network would be nice but you have to have the service that will provide it. I could use it as i’m on fibre optic right to the device. I would definitely not get anything less than the gigabit ethernet.
I think you can use ethtool on Arch to set offload.
As far as the Intel NIC are concerned I’m not that fussy with thier newer chips. But everyone will probably have their own likes or dislikes and opinion on that. It all boils down to what’s more important because the board you pick or want with certain features may or may not have either brand of ethernet. You’ll have to see. Wireless spec 802.11 AX is out now so newer chips will be geared towards that. Again you have to have the hardware to provide that.