This is really a hardcore overclocker board more than anything and the price reflects that. It's already set records for DRAM frequency (first board over 6000 MT/s).
As the article says, there's numerous other options for SFF X570/X470 at more reasonable prices for people who aren't chasing WR overclocks or who don't have a blank check to build the "best" small system.
More for ram than cpu. You are right, the ryzen cpu's just don't o/c that much to spend so much money on this board. The differences in speed aren't worth the headache.
My crosshair VII was only $249 and it is considered a fantastic OC AMD board with overbuilt VRM capable of OCing memory well as long as the CPU can handle it.
$400 is WAY too much for a tiny mobo that wont OC ryzen 3000 any higher then your typical AM4 board, on account of ryzen 3000 having 0 OC headroom, and even if it did, you dont need a $400 mobo to do that.
This generation motherboards have jumped $100-200 in price while prancing out touted features that mean jack in real world usage. People need to stop wasting their money on this overpriced garbage.
Given that X99 SFF boards sell for more then $200 and they have less PCIe bandwidth and a lower PCIe version, older Wifi, older USB gen, ect. I don't see a reason why this board wouldn't be worth more then $200. If people can justify paying Intel's premium for 3% more gaming performance, you can certainly justify twice the PCIe speed.
Yet another X570 with an embedded fan. Pass. This is a regression, from solid state to mechanical moving parts. Fan quality has increased since the horror stories of the 90's and 2000's, but an improved bad idea is still a bad idea. Why can only Gigabyte cool an 11W load passively?
Been a bit disappointed in Zen2, X570/PCI4 boards in general and fans certainly do not help. Bleeding edge for sure, but bleeding edge issues as well. My I7-3770k (longest lasting CPU I ever had) is going to have to last another year. Hoping Zen3 things settle down and the tech is mature enough to jump on board.
On any decent board you can set a fan curve and effectively silence the fan. On my Gigabyte X570 it never runs at all even in intense benchmark or gaming sessions. I do agree that having fans back on motherboards is just crap and should have been avoided. I can only guess that there are edge cases that made AMD demand this level of cooling, I just haven't found it yet.
all these people complaining about the chipset fan.. the 2 fans for my cpu cooler would probably drown it out, and is probably louder, let alone the other 6 case fans i have in my case...
Concerns from most people are about fan longevity and not noise, although I will readily admit that after using several low end laptops that rely purely on passive cooling and eMMC or other form of solid state storage, the silence is difficult to give up in exchange for what feels like a archaic, non-portable box filled with fans. That's really where I'm at in computing these days. My needs, even gaming, are met by passively cooled, tiny laptops and I really see no reason to go back to desktop computers, dedicated GPUs, and systems that need cooling fans.
i have fans from 5+ years ago, spinning 8-10 hrs a day, that still work just fine, i even booted up an old A64 fx60, with an Asus board, that has a chipset fan, and it still works just fine. so i dont get the longevity aspect.. sorry PeachNcream, but you always comparing a desktop vs a notebook, kind of makes your view moot. a desktop will, for the most part, always be louder then a notebook, and the fact that you use passively cooled ones on top of that, further makes it moot
you needs may be met by such a laptop, but, what games do you play???????? that's the key, my guess, nothing that was released in the last few years if they run fun on such a laptop, or facebook type games. i have some old games, that i bet, would make your laptop cry, and on the one i have, to get them to play, its medium graphics or less. but each use case is different, but also, cant compare them, equally.
I have a nforce 2 motherboard running windows xp, and it has had its chipset fan replaced several times before getting a large heatsink upgrade to be rid of that annoyance.
I vividly remember my pentium II/III PCs getting new fans every year, because those tiny fans would gum up and become rattly garbage.
I still replace laptop fans on the regular that are 3-4 years old and are used on a daily basis.
There is a reason so many people have an aversion to tiny fans. They are junk.
Ah, I understand now. Because I don't use a computer in the same way you do and my opinion threatens yours, it's clearly the case that we need to make up rules here at Anandtech that disallow somone from reading an article until they can prove that it is directly relevant to the computing choices they currently make.
What a flawed method of arguing -- of all things, over the presence of a small cooling fan. Feel threatned about a couple of 30mm fans that might fail? Defend the lack of noise! On wait, it's isn't about noise?! You're not allowed to be here arguing in the first place with your point about fan failures!
What children you're acting like over your toys and hobbies.
It's the same people complaining on every article about the same issue, despite the fact that they've been told time and time again that these fans run at low RPM or off completely when you are not pushing the IO heavily. For most people, they are inaudible 100% of the time. These people want to spin their narrative, not try to understand what people are telling them
I won't say that I'm disappointed. I like Zen2.... but I will do just one more cycle of waiting.... I want to see the Zen3 successor to the Ryzen 9-3950X... and the RDNA 2 successor to the Radeon RX 5700 XT. That's all probably 12-15 months away, but that's just about right. I too am on an I7-3770k (longest lasting CPU I have ever had as well). This will be the last machine I build of my professional working career (If I've gotten 7+ years out of my I7-3770k, I'm sure I'll get 5 years out of the Zen3 16core CPU).
hmmm, my trusty SilverStone SG055BB is mini-ITX / mini-DTX compatible (I own two of them). However, I'd pay a max of $300usd for a board like this (even though admittedly it's just about the perfect board... optical audio out, wifi and 2 M2 slots for storage... I ALWAYS have two harddrives).
We will see if a successor to this board is available in 12-15 months when I make the Ryzen Zen3 & Radeon RDNA-2 jump.
I'll be fine if only PCI4 is supported at that point.... I won't hold off for PCI5 to be implemented.
Will be interesting to see if we start seeing 4TB M.2 storage devices at that point as well... and if 32GB Dimms at good speed will be more affordable. Yeah.. Looking at 16 Cores @ 4Ghz+, 2X32GB for 64GB of Ram, 2X4TB for 8TB of storage to drive 2 32" 4K monitors. Will be a nice rig for the sunset years of my IT career...
honestly I do not understand folks who say this you have a CPU that is in modern terms slow and a system thats the same AMD comes along with a really disruptive product that is leagues ahead of what you have and in its third generation yet still you want to wait ! What the heck exactly do they need to do to get your buy in, if AMD didnt exist or bring Zen to the party intel would happily keep chugging out its same CPUs for the next 10 years, support the company thats brought the fight to them!
Well, I will build the new system with cash on hand... So I may have misrepresented why I will sit out...... It's just that in my budget at end of 2020/2021 will make room for my computer. By then it will be Ryzen Zen 3 Radeon RDNA-2 and I will be curious to see what they offer... That's all. If their release is stalled significantly... then I 12 months from now I will buy current gen Ryzen Zen 2 Radeon RDNA....and would be equally delighted to do so...
But perhaps in that time.... we will see a X570 variant that won't require a fan.... again, won't be a show stopper, as the CPU and Video cards will have fans aplenty anyway.....
Noise isn't the concern. Fan failure is what bothers the OP as indicated by noting fans are a regression in the movement toward fewer moving parts (which can suffer from mechanical failure). While noise might be a concern, broken little fans that are a PIA to replace are what have peoples' panties in a twist right now and we haven't seen any X570 motherboards operating long enough to get a good understanding of whether or not fan failures are going to be a problem or if, as you implied, they are generally not running to begin with (which begs the question why the motherboard manufacturers are adding them in the first place instead of using a more effective passive heatsink).
May I kindly take Peach's initiative? xD Not interested in laptops. Have one, it's fine. The current pricing situation is meh. 6/12 ultrabook and 8/16 laptop parts are crazy expensive. Graphics are expensive (Turing), boring (Turing GTX) or both (Radeon, sadly. Power hogs or underperformers, or both). Zen is a skillful fighter for new users but nothing of particular interest over a good ol' 4700MQ (minus the Vega... got a dGPU anyway)... As for the fans, sorry bud. If the interested customer has to find ways in which a hackjob (just sry, this IS a hackjob... it's not 2005 anymore) doesn't svck (oh the fans are low RPM, oh they're not that short-lived, oh there's passive mode at 0.1% load) and is actually *not that bad*, then it's not really a good hackjob. The need for this dayum fan in the first place screams a littley oopsie from ASMedia, or a design less efficient than usual on AMD's side. OK higher demands than for 300 and 400 series, then why does Shintel get away without le fans? (Pls correct if wrong.) Also, you can still do it passive, funnily enough. Why should it be a blessing and not a default option? Case in point right above (or below?) me. Adaptation 100. Spare me some lube guys, been shilling for AyyMD, AsRock, Powercolor and Seasonic long enough :P want to try out some other companies TL;DR there's no advantage nor purpose in reinventing the sleeve bearing (or dual ball, depends) wheel.
PCI express 4.0 has significantly higher power requirements and thus heat output. X570 chipset is a repurposed Matisse IOD. Why you people complain about the chipset fan is beyond me, always gotta complain about something I guess. It's completely bloody inaudible on my X570M pro 4, and also completely unnecessary for all but the most intense I/o on both gen4 m.2 and the GPU.
Interesting that someone feels compelled to make up rules after the fact when they find an opinion disagreeable. It points to a shortcoming in the security of your own opposing viewpoint when you lash out to say, "Oh yeah? Well you aren't allowed to wear the fire helmet when we play pretend during preschool recess because you played with the police hat last recess." Please, reflect on your thoughts before you allow yourself to lay hands on a keyboard.
I can't hear the fan on my Strix x570-E at all. The fact that it's hidden from view was a bit of a selling point for me as well. Not thrilled about having chipset fans again but the fans appear to be much better quality than the ones we used to see back when they were common.
Oh, please. Have you owned X570? Have you? If not then stop complaining about things you don't know about. Your complaint is completely pointless and it just seems you've hopped on the "complain about the fan" bandwagon.
Go overpay for an EOL Z390 that doesn't even have gen4, instead.
Typo in the Visual Inspection section, second paragraph, first line - "..SO-DIMM.2 slot abouve the main PCIe slot." - Word "above" has an extra letter in it.
While I know you haven't reviewed it, the most direct competition to this board is Asus' own X570i Strix board (ITX), which is now appearing in the wild. It also has 2x m.2 slots, one on the back and one under the chipset heatsink. The audio isn't quite as ridiculous, but the power delivery and networking stuff is mostly the same. Would love to see a comparison of the two. The ASRock board is intriguing but lacks a second m.2 slot- while Thunderbolt is great and all, 2x m.2 slots are really nice in a SFF system.
I'm still unclear what you really get for an extra $140 with the Crosshair over the Strix x570-i (currently $259 on Newegg). Seems like an awful lot of money for upgraded audio with more limited SFF case options.
I really wish Anandtech would start including the following in their motherboard reviews: - IOMMU groups - SR-IOV support for the NIC and GPU (tested using AMD's MxGPU cards) Dual booting every OS that needs the GPU (I have three, one for CAD, one for gaming and my main, which has Photoshop installed) is getting tiring.
I know AMD and nVidia consider SR-IOV based access to the GPU an enterprise feature, but it's about time to acknowledge that many enthusiasts could also make use of this.
And performance for USB, the network, data, sound, and tb3 if it has it. It's like they want to ignore all the parts of a motherboard except some basic cpu benchmarks.
For x570, only asrock has gotten their tb3 cert through at this time. So you can k ow for now that only asrock boards will have tb3 this Gen. But I agree this ibfonwoikd be nice for all boards reviews going forwards since it will be a possibility for all platforms.
I am baffled by these prices. With Ryzen being a SoC the added value of the x570 is little more than a hybrid IF/PCIe/USB/SATA switch, perhaps a $40 value, especially given that it's twin is already included on the CPU die carrier.
So where does the rest of the money go? Can't be the gold on the slot contacts, because $80 mainboards have those, too.
In a day and age where you can get 6 4GHz cores at $200 and 32GB of RAM at $100, I completely fail to see why the mainboard should cost more than both.
That is the price of a dual socket Xeon server mainboard like the Intel S2600CWTSR!
Makes me afraid of where TR boards will launch... What good are cheap CPUs, SSDs and RAM when motherboard vendors get greedy?
Well the power distribution it must be, because WiFi 6 and BT 5 is a $12 upgrade as M.2 and I doubt the RealTek 2.5GBit chip is even that much for OEMs: It's very similar to the 1Gbit commodity cousin that everyone sells at practically zero extra cost and even as a USB3 or PCIe x1 variant is $40 in low-volume retail today.
But even if you take your entry level x570 mainboard for $150 (ASRock X570 PHANTOM GAMING 4) and add the other to at retail, that leaves $230 for... power delivery?
I guess I value energy efficiency over the ability to pump 200Watts into a CPU that can't convert that into compute. It's the reason I keep eying the Ryzens to replace Xeon E5.
And I *would* pay extra to have two bifuricated PCIe 4 x8 lanes switched into four PCIe 3 x16 slots to gain some workstation type flexibility in a full ATX form factor, since I have plenty of PCIe v3 hardware, I want to keep using (e.g. RTX 2080ti) and nobody yet offering anything PCIe v4 that I find attractive.
Even a classic 8+4+4(+4) lane setup would be ok, assuming that native PCIe v4 adapters will come for faster fabrics.
AMD wants to sell TR in that space, but those will have Xeon E5 prices again.
abufrejoval, you seem to know so much about how much a motherboard should cost, how about you break down how much EACH and EVERY part on the board costs, as well as the PWB costs to make, right down to the design, and manufacture of the board itself ?? ryzen isnt really a SoC, those have A LOT more in them then just the cpu cores, memory controller, and some IO.
Why dont you justify why these boards are so stupid expensive? The crosshair VIII costs $110 more then the VII did, and all it brings to the table is a single PCIe 4.0 slot and wifi 6. Wooo?
I'm kind of disappointed with all the motherboard manufacturers effectively ignoring micro-ATX. There's all kind of awesome features being shoved into mini-ITX and now DTX boards, but these boards are then limited to only 2 RAM slots and the need for riser cards to fit all the features.
MicroATX isn't all that much bigger (especially compared to DTX) and a lot of mini-ITX cases are growing to micro-ATX proportions for improved cooling and ATX is overkill for most use cases now with the downfall of multi-GPU for gaming and 5.25" drives, so why are manufacturers avoiding this form factor?
Maybe, but most GPUs are still longer than mini-ITX/DTX motherboards are wide and about the same width as micro-ATX, so a lot of cases will need the extra length for the GPU anyways.
"the truth is that the mini-DTX size does cancel out any mini-ITX chassis designs, causing the user to look at micro-ATX cases."
I'm sorry but I completly disagree with this. I have been waiting for years for Mini-DTX to take off. If you look at most enthusiast ITX cases they are designed for a dual slot GPU. There is nobody who is taking this motherboard and using a basic single slot graphics card.
The extra motherboard space is using the wasted space under the GPU for more features and it makes perfect sence. It it not any wider than ITX is.
Asus even recessed the lower board connctors slightly and made them at right angles to fit your front panel / usb cables in within most ITX case designs.
Frankly this is shody reporting and a complete misunderstanding of the differnce between Mini-ITX and Mini-DTX
I agree. I’m going to use this mobo in a Lian Li TU150WX case. This Li Lian ITX case will work with a DTX mobo. Like all mobos you have to bear the responsibility to match the case with the mobo; it’s no different with this mobo or any mobo.
I also don’t get the cost argument. If you don’t see value in this board then don’t purchase it. It’s an enthusiast mobo; not targeted for folks seeking a value/economy class mobo.
And finally; you don’t have to have reasoning to purchase it. I just love the way it looks and the fact that it has a riser M2 board and isolation for audio. It offers much in a small form factor. One can elect to purchase any mobo for a variety of reasons.
Very happy with my Aorus Master x570 that rings the bell @ ~$350; It's been practically problem-free since July 9, when I installed it, through every bios flash GB has put up for download, both beta and official. What I've read suggests that Asus isn't maybe as popular as it once was years ago, and that the quality of the x570 mboards is lacking--but take that with a huge grain of salt as I have no Asus x570 mboards around and haven't used any of them myself.
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Marlin1975 - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
Nice board; but not $200, let alone $400, nice.Destoya - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
This is really a hardcore overclocker board more than anything and the price reflects that. It's already set records for DRAM frequency (first board over 6000 MT/s).As the article says, there's numerous other options for SFF X570/X470 at more reasonable prices for people who aren't chasing WR overclocks or who don't have a blank check to build the "best" small system.
shabby - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
How much better will this overclock than a $200 board? 50mhz more? The new ryzen chips simply don't overclock well so you don't need any fancy mobos.Dug - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
More for ram than cpu. You are right, the ryzen cpu's just don't o/c that much to spend so much money on this board. The differences in speed aren't worth the headache.TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
My crosshair VII was only $249 and it is considered a fantastic OC AMD board with overbuilt VRM capable of OCing memory well as long as the CPU can handle it.$400 is WAY too much for a tiny mobo that wont OC ryzen 3000 any higher then your typical AM4 board, on account of ryzen 3000 having 0 OC headroom, and even if it did, you dont need a $400 mobo to do that.
This generation motherboards have jumped $100-200 in price while prancing out touted features that mean jack in real world usage. People need to stop wasting their money on this overpriced garbage.
guitarmassacre - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
In what world would this board sell for sub-$200? The cheapest itx is currently $220.evernessince - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Given that X99 SFF boards sell for more then $200 and they have less PCIe bandwidth and a lower PCIe version, older Wifi, older USB gen, ect. I don't see a reason why this board wouldn't be worth more then $200. If people can justify paying Intel's premium for 3% more gaming performance, you can certainly justify twice the PCIe speed.Daveteauk - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
$200?!? You are a dreamer! What colour is the sky in your world!?Sivar - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
Yet another X570 with an embedded fan. Pass.This is a regression, from solid state to mechanical moving parts. Fan quality has increased since the horror stories of the 90's and 2000's, but an improved bad idea is still a bad idea.
Why can only Gigabyte cool an 11W load passively?
PeachNCream - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
It actually has two 30mm fans rather than one.Holliday75 - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
Been a bit disappointed in Zen2, X570/PCI4 boards in general and fans certainly do not help. Bleeding edge for sure, but bleeding edge issues as well. My I7-3770k (longest lasting CPU I ever had) is going to have to last another year. Hoping Zen3 things settle down and the tech is mature enough to jump on board.hansmuff - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
On any decent board you can set a fan curve and effectively silence the fan. On my Gigabyte X570 it never runs at all even in intense benchmark or gaming sessions. I do agree that having fans back on motherboards is just crap and should have been avoided. I can only guess that there are edge cases that made AMD demand this level of cooling, I just haven't found it yet.Korguz - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
all these people complaining about the chipset fan.. the 2 fans for my cpu cooler would probably drown it out, and is probably louder, let alone the other 6 case fans i have in my case...PeachNCream - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Concerns from most people are about fan longevity and not noise, although I will readily admit that after using several low end laptops that rely purely on passive cooling and eMMC or other form of solid state storage, the silence is difficult to give up in exchange for what feels like a archaic, non-portable box filled with fans. That's really where I'm at in computing these days. My needs, even gaming, are met by passively cooled, tiny laptops and I really see no reason to go back to desktop computers, dedicated GPUs, and systems that need cooling fans.Korguz - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
i have fans from 5+ years ago, spinning 8-10 hrs a day, that still work just fine, i even booted up an old A64 fx60, with an Asus board, that has a chipset fan, and it still works just fine. so i dont get the longevity aspect..sorry PeachNcream, but you always comparing a desktop vs a notebook, kind of makes your view moot. a desktop will, for the most part, always be louder then a notebook, and the fact that you use passively cooled ones on top of that, further makes it moot
you needs may be met by such a laptop, but, what games do you play???????? that's the key, my guess, nothing that was released in the last few years if they run fun on such a laptop, or facebook type games. i have some old games, that i bet, would make your laptop cry, and on the one i have, to get them to play, its medium graphics or less. but each use case is different, but also, cant compare them, equally.
PeachNCream - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Your older motherboard is a sample size of one.TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
I have a nforce 2 motherboard running windows xp, and it has had its chipset fan replaced several times before getting a large heatsink upgrade to be rid of that annoyance.I vividly remember my pentium II/III PCs getting new fans every year, because those tiny fans would gum up and become rattly garbage.
I still replace laptop fans on the regular that are 3-4 years old and are used on a daily basis.
There is a reason so many people have an aversion to tiny fans. They are junk.
Oliseo - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
If you've no interest, why read the articles, let alone argue with people in the comments.AshlayW - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
No one cares that you use a passive mobile potato for your Facebook gaming needs. This website is about hardware enthusiastsPeachNCream - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Ah, I understand now. Because I don't use a computer in the same way you do and my opinion threatens yours, it's clearly the case that we need to make up rules here at Anandtech that disallow somone from reading an article until they can prove that it is directly relevant to the computing choices they currently make.What a flawed method of arguing -- of all things, over the presence of a small cooling fan. Feel threatned about a couple of 30mm fans that might fail? Defend the lack of noise! On wait, it's isn't about noise?! You're not allowed to be here arguing in the first place with your point about fan failures!
What children you're acting like over your toys and hobbies.
evernessince - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
It's the same people complaining on every article about the same issue, despite the fact that they've been told time and time again that these fans run at low RPM or off completely when you are not pushing the IO heavily. For most people, they are inaudible 100% of the time. These people want to spin their narrative, not try to understand what people are telling themHardwareDufus - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
I won't say that I'm disappointed. I like Zen2.... but I will do just one more cycle of waiting.... I want to see the Zen3 successor to the Ryzen 9-3950X... and the RDNA 2 successor to the Radeon RX 5700 XT. That's all probably 12-15 months away, but that's just about right. I too am on an I7-3770k (longest lasting CPU I have ever had as well). This will be the last machine I build of my professional working career (If I've gotten 7+ years out of my I7-3770k, I'm sure I'll get 5 years out of the Zen3 16core CPU).hmmm, my trusty SilverStone SG055BB is mini-ITX / mini-DTX compatible (I own two of them). However, I'd pay a max of $300usd for a board like this (even though admittedly it's just about the perfect board... optical audio out, wifi and 2 M2 slots for storage... I ALWAYS have two harddrives).
We will see if a successor to this board is available in 12-15 months when I make the Ryzen Zen3 & Radeon RDNA-2 jump.
I'll be fine if only PCI4 is supported at that point.... I won't hold off for PCI5 to be implemented.
Will be interesting to see if we start seeing 4TB M.2 storage devices at that point as well... and if 32GB Dimms at good speed will be more affordable. Yeah.. Looking at 16 Cores @ 4Ghz+, 2X32GB for 64GB of Ram, 2X4TB for 8TB of storage to drive 2 32" 4K monitors. Will be a nice rig for the sunset years of my IT career...
alufan - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
honestly I do not understand folks who say this you have a CPU that is in modern terms slow and a system thats the same AMD comes along with a really disruptive product that is leagues ahead of what you have and in its third generation yet still you want to wait !What the heck exactly do they need to do to get your buy in, if AMD didnt exist or bring Zen to the party intel would happily keep chugging out its same CPUs for the next 10 years, support the company thats brought the fight to them!
HardwareDufus - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
Well, I will build the new system with cash on hand... So I may have misrepresented why I will sit out...... It's just that in my budget at end of 2020/2021 will make room for my computer. By then it will be Ryzen Zen 3 Radeon RDNA-2 and I will be curious to see what they offer... That's all. If their release is stalled significantly... then I 12 months from now I will buy current gen Ryzen Zen 2 Radeon RDNA....and would be equally delighted to do so...HardwareDufus - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
But perhaps in that time.... we will see a X570 variant that won't require a fan.... again, won't be a show stopper, as the CPU and Video cards will have fans aplenty anyway.....evernessince - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
And yet all X570 motherboards either turn off the fan during low load or run at low RPM, making then inaudible.PeachNCream - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
Noise isn't the concern. Fan failure is what bothers the OP as indicated by noting fans are a regression in the movement toward fewer moving parts (which can suffer from mechanical failure). While noise might be a concern, broken little fans that are a PIA to replace are what have peoples' panties in a twist right now and we haven't seen any X570 motherboards operating long enough to get a good understanding of whether or not fan failures are going to be a problem or if, as you implied, they are generally not running to begin with (which begs the question why the motherboard manufacturers are adding them in the first place instead of using a more effective passive heatsink).Oliseo - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
But you're not interested in anything but laptops, I don't get why you're arguing with people about something you no longer care about.Just like arguing I suppose.
RavenRampkin - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
May I kindly take Peach's initiative? xDNot interested in laptops. Have one, it's fine. The current pricing situation is meh. 6/12 ultrabook and 8/16 laptop parts are crazy expensive. Graphics are expensive (Turing), boring (Turing GTX) or both (Radeon, sadly. Power hogs or underperformers, or both). Zen is a skillful fighter for new users but nothing of particular interest over a good ol' 4700MQ (minus the Vega... got a dGPU anyway)...
As for the fans, sorry bud. If the interested customer has to find ways in which a hackjob (just sry, this IS a hackjob... it's not 2005 anymore) doesn't svck (oh the fans are low RPM, oh they're not that short-lived, oh there's passive mode at 0.1% load) and is actually *not that bad*, then it's not really a good hackjob. The need for this dayum fan in the first place screams a littley oopsie from ASMedia, or a design less efficient than usual on AMD's side. OK higher demands than for 300 and 400 series, then why does Shintel get away without le fans? (Pls correct if wrong.) Also, you can still do it passive, funnily enough. Why should it be a blessing and not a default option?
Case in point right above (or below?) me. Adaptation 100. Spare me some lube guys, been shilling for AyyMD, AsRock, Powercolor and Seasonic long enough :P want to try out some other companies
TL;DR there's no advantage nor purpose in reinventing the sleeve bearing (or dual ball, depends) wheel.
AshlayW - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
PCI express 4.0 has significantly higher power requirements and thus heat output. X570 chipset is a repurposed Matisse IOD. Why you people complain about the chipset fan is beyond me, always gotta complain about something I guess. It's completely bloody inaudible on my X570M pro 4, and also completely unnecessary for all but the most intense I/o on both gen4 m.2 and the GPU.Stop complaining.
RavenRampkin - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
Yup, point below me. Little correction *:DPeachNCream - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
Interesting that someone feels compelled to make up rules after the fact when they find an opinion disagreeable. It points to a shortcoming in the security of your own opposing viewpoint when you lash out to say, "Oh yeah? Well you aren't allowed to wear the fire helmet when we play pretend during preschool recess because you played with the police hat last recess." Please, reflect on your thoughts before you allow yourself to lay hands on a keyboard.just4U - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
I can't hear the fan on my Strix x570-E at all. The fact that it's hidden from view was a bit of a selling point for me as well. Not thrilled about having chipset fans again but the fans appear to be much better quality than the ones we used to see back when they were common.AshlayW - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Oh, please. Have you owned X570? Have you? If not then stop complaining about things you don't know about. Your complaint is completely pointless and it just seems you've hopped on the "complain about the fan" bandwagon.Go overpay for an EOL Z390 that doesn't even have gen4, instead.
PeachNCream - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
Typo in the Visual Inspection section, second paragraph, first line - "..SO-DIMM.2 slot abouve the main PCIe slot." - Word "above" has an extra letter in it.masteraleph - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
While I know you haven't reviewed it, the most direct competition to this board is Asus' own X570i Strix board (ITX), which is now appearing in the wild. It also has 2x m.2 slots, one on the back and one under the chipset heatsink. The audio isn't quite as ridiculous, but the power delivery and networking stuff is mostly the same. Would love to see a comparison of the two. The ASRock board is intriguing but lacks a second m.2 slot- while Thunderbolt is great and all, 2x m.2 slots are really nice in a SFF system.mrvco - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
I'm still unclear what you really get for an extra $140 with the Crosshair over the Strix x570-i (currently $259 on Newegg). Seems like an awful lot of money for upgraded audio with more limited SFF case options.inighthawki - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
On "System Performance" page at the end:"and the ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Impact did well with a latency time of 128.2 ms. "
Just FYI i think you mean to write 128.2 us (not ms) to match the table being microseconds.
a5cent - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
I really wish Anandtech would start including the following in their motherboard reviews:- IOMMU groups
- SR-IOV support for the NIC and GPU (tested using AMD's MxGPU cards)
Dual booting every OS that needs the GPU (I have three, one for CAD, one for gaming and my main, which has Photoshop installed) is getting tiring.
I know AMD and nVidia consider SR-IOV based access to the GPU an enterprise feature, but it's about time to acknowledge that many enthusiasts could also make use of this.
Dug - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
And performance for USB, the network, data, sound, and tb3 if it has it.It's like they want to ignore all the parts of a motherboard except some basic cpu benchmarks.
Dug - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
I also don't get the non uefi post time. Does anyone use legacy when setting up a new system these days?lipscomb88 - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
For x570, only asrock has gotten their tb3 cert through at this time. So you can k ow for now that only asrock boards will have tb3 this Gen. But I agree this ibfonwoikd be nice for all boards reviews going forwards since it will be a possibility for all platforms.hanselltc - Saturday, October 26, 2019 - link
Kinda wanna see the Strix X570 I. It is apparently just a mini Impact in terms of VRM.abufrejoval - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
I am baffled by these prices. With Ryzen being a SoC the added value of the x570 is little more than a hybrid IF/PCIe/USB/SATA switch, perhaps a $40 value, especially given that it's twin is already included on the CPU die carrier.So where does the rest of the money go? Can't be the gold on the slot contacts, because $80 mainboards have those, too.
In a day and age where you can get 6 4GHz cores at $200 and 32GB of RAM at $100, I completely fail to see why the mainboard should cost more than both.
That is the price of a dual socket Xeon server mainboard like the Intel S2600CWTSR!
Makes me afraid of where TR boards will launch... What good are cheap CPUs, SSDs and RAM when motherboard vendors get greedy?
just4U - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
12+4 power phases are one reason, Most of the upper end X470s had that but not Bluetooth 5.0 Wi-fi 6.0 2.5GHZ Nic PCI 4.0 etc..abufrejoval - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
Well the power distribution it must be, because WiFi 6 and BT 5 is a $12 upgrade as M.2 and I doubt the RealTek 2.5GBit chip is even that much for OEMs: It's very similar to the 1Gbit commodity cousin that everyone sells at practically zero extra cost and even as a USB3 or PCIe x1 variant is $40 in low-volume retail today.But even if you take your entry level x570 mainboard for $150 (ASRock X570 PHANTOM GAMING 4) and add the other to at retail, that leaves $230 for... power delivery?
I guess I value energy efficiency over the ability to pump 200Watts into a CPU that can't convert that into compute. It's the reason I keep eying the Ryzens to replace Xeon E5.
And I *would* pay extra to have two bifuricated PCIe 4 x8 lanes switched into four PCIe 3 x16 slots to gain some workstation type flexibility in a full ATX form factor, since I have plenty of PCIe v3 hardware, I want to keep using (e.g. RTX 2080ti) and nobody yet offering anything PCIe v4 that I find attractive.
Even a classic 8+4+4(+4) lane setup would be ok, assuming that native PCIe v4 adapters will come for faster fabrics.
AMD wants to sell TR in that space, but those will have Xeon E5 prices again.
Korguz - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
abufrejoval, you seem to know so much about how much a motherboard should cost, how about you break down how much EACH and EVERY part on the board costs, as well as the PWB costs to make, right down to the design, and manufacture of the board itself ?? ryzen isnt really a SoC, those have A LOT more in them then just the cpu cores, memory controller, and some IO.TheinsanegamerN - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
Why dont you justify why these boards are so stupid expensive? The crosshair VIII costs $110 more then the VII did, and all it brings to the table is a single PCIe 4.0 slot and wifi 6. Wooo?gamer1000k - Sunday, October 27, 2019 - link
I'm kind of disappointed with all the motherboard manufacturers effectively ignoring micro-ATX. There's all kind of awesome features being shoved into mini-ITX and now DTX boards, but these boards are then limited to only 2 RAM slots and the need for riser cards to fit all the features.MicroATX isn't all that much bigger (especially compared to DTX) and a lot of mini-ITX cases are growing to micro-ATX proportions for improved cooling and ATX is overkill for most use cases now with the downfall of multi-GPU for gaming and 5.25" drives, so why are manufacturers avoiding this form factor?
NanakiEmi - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Most Micro ATX boards are considerably wider compared to ITX and DTX. They are still a very different class.gamer1000k - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
Maybe, but most GPUs are still longer than mini-ITX/DTX motherboards are wide and about the same width as micro-ATX, so a lot of cases will need the extra length for the GPU anyways.NanakiEmi - Monday, October 28, 2019 - link
"the truth is that the mini-DTX size does cancel out any mini-ITX chassis designs, causing the user to look at micro-ATX cases."I'm sorry but I completly disagree with this. I have been waiting for years for Mini-DTX to take off. If you look at most enthusiast ITX cases they are designed for a dual slot GPU. There is nobody who is taking this motherboard and using a basic single slot graphics card.
The extra motherboard space is using the wasted space under the GPU for more features and it makes perfect sence. It it not any wider than ITX is.
Asus even recessed the lower board connctors slightly and made them at right angles to fit your front panel / usb cables in within most ITX case designs.
Frankly this is shody reporting and a complete misunderstanding of the differnce between Mini-ITX and Mini-DTX
KESM - Sunday, March 22, 2020 - link
I agree. I’m going to use this mobo in a Lian Li TU150WX case. This Li Lian ITX case will work with a DTX mobo. Like all mobos you have to bear the responsibility to match the case with the mobo; it’s no different with this mobo or any mobo.I also don’t get the cost argument. If you don’t see value in this board then don’t purchase it. It’s an enthusiast mobo; not targeted for folks seeking a value/economy class mobo.
And finally; you don’t have to have reasoning to purchase it. I just love the way it looks and the fact that it has a riser M2 board and isolation for audio. It offers much in a small form factor. One can elect to purchase any mobo for a variety of reasons.
WaltC - Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - link
Very happy with my Aorus Master x570 that rings the bell @ ~$350; It's been practically problem-free since July 9, when I installed it, through every bios flash GB has put up for download, both beta and official. What I've read suggests that Asus isn't maybe as popular as it once was years ago, and that the quality of the x570 mboards is lacking--but take that with a huge grain of salt as I have no Asus x570 mboards around and haven't used any of them myself.umano - Tuesday, November 19, 2019 - link
This is a great board but with thunderbolt 3 it would have been almost perfect