buyers who would never even consider
a $1,000 motherboard. It’s also
important to note that X470 will not
be phased out, with ongoing support
and production set to continue for the
foreseeable future. Many B450 boards
are also receiving ongoing BIOS
updates, though we’d be wary of
running the higher core count CPUs
on boards that have relatively weak
power delivery systems and cooling.THE FASTEST STORAGE SOLUTION
PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives provide the most
visible performance gains. There are
already PCIe 4.0 drives on the market
and these are the fastest consumer
level drives on the market right now,
at least in terms of sequential read
and write performance.
The real benefit of PCIe 4.0 is the
flexibility it offers motherboard
manufacturers when it comes to
designing the I/O. All of the auxiliary
controllers are connected to the CPU
or chipset via PCIe lanes. As PCIe 4.0
doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0, this
means a single PCIe 4.0 lane can do the
job of dual PCIe 3.0 lanes. This allows
for some creatively designed and
equipped motherboards. 10G LAN?
Extra SATA? More USB 3.2 ports? All
of these things can be relatively easily
added to an X570 motherboard
compared to the likes of a PCIe 3.0
lane limited Z390 board.
The X570 platform keeps the
familiar dual channel memory
configuration, but supports a faster
official memory speed of up toDDR4-3200. First generation Ryzen
suffered from poor memory speed
support. This has been addressed with
Ryzen 3 and X570 motherboards with
the addition of an Infinity Fabric
divider, which removes a bottleneck
that held back faster memory support.
Memory at around DDR4-3600 or little
higher is proving to be the sweet spot
for performance. Beyond this, the
memory clock to Infinity Fabric
divider drops to 2:1, adding a latency
penalty.A BIT HOT UNDER THE COLLAR
You may have noticed that almost all
X570 motherboards have a chipset
cooling fan. There are two main
reasons for this, depending on the
particular board. The first reason is
because the chipset draws up to 11W
of power compared to around 6W for
X470. This is primarily due to PCIe 4.0
power requirements. A second reason
is that many motherboard
manufacturers are incorporating M.2
drive cooling into the chipset heat
sink, something we’re not keen on for
cooling and convenience reasons.
Sometimes almost the whole bottom
of the board is a giant heat sink
cooling multiple hot M.2 drives plusthe 11W PCH. That explains the fan.
The good news is that most
manufacturers will configure their
boards in such a way that the fans
won’t spin up until they hit a certain
temperature threshold. Some boards
are quieter than others, while others
see their fan temporarily shriek like a
banshee upon bootup. BIOS updates
have already appeared to improve
this. In general use, the chipset fans
remain either silent or unobtrusive.
Beware though, tiny fans are
extremely annoying when they do
spin up, so a custom BIOS fan profile
could be well worth it.
The performance of Ryzen 3rd-gen
is seriously impressive. When
combined with the features on offer
from the feature rich X570 platform,
AMD deserves serious consideration
from every kind of PC user. It’s time to
take a closer look at four impressive
motherboards from Asrock, Asus,
Gigabyte and MSI.
These boards represent the high
end, but not the seriously top end
boards, which are, frankly, irrelevant
to the majority of the market. Read on
as we look at arguably the most
feature rich desktop motherboards
ever seen.“Some boards quieter than others,
while othersseetheir fan temporarily
shriek like a banshee upon bootup. “
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