Thanks
@tomshardware and @joeshields for the review however unfortunately this review is incomplete because it does not address the main reason why someone would want to buy this board : the allegedly 40 GBps thunderbolt 4 ports. I mean come on you list the ports in the title and in the supposed pros but you never actually test them even though these ports are the prime reason someone would want to spend 450$ on a board !
Based on your testing the board is no better or worse than say the B550 Tuf Gaming Wifi that cost 300$ less.
I want to see one or two Razer Core X in each thunderbolt 4 port + one graphics card in each PCIe x16 slot and see the result of some rendering or mining, with a couple nvme drives installed.
It is a question mark as to how bandwidth is allocated when you saturate the PCI lanes with external GPUs and nvme drives and thunderbolt devices and 10Gbps networking simultaneously, I assume some or all of the i/o would see some degradation in such scenarios.
I am especially interested in the compatibility of thunderbolt devices because I have seen reports on Reddit of people not being able to use the thunderbolt ports correctly (especially for eGPU) with the B550 Asus Creator board, and using the x570 chipset could solve that. Not to mention AMD boards with any thunderbolt support are rare so compatibility and support is a question mark for potential buyers that is much more important to address than a couple points difference in the usual Futuremark testing.
If I have learned anything in the past year, it's that just because a port looks like thunderbolt doesnt mean that thunderbolt functionality will actually work. For example usb 3.1 gen 2 type C in previous ryzen boards was quite misleading because it does not actually support an eGPU.
It would be interesting also to check performance when running the PC from an external thunderbolt nvme ssd such as the one from plugable (with the OS installed on said external SSD) .
It would be interesting to see the transfer time for a large 4k video file from such an external ssd towards an internal one to test the real world speed of the thunderbolt 4 ports.
So many critical testing is missing from this review to give potential buyers an idea of what this board is really worth. All in all the review is a missed opportunity to address these concerns relating to Thunderbolt 4 support and compatibility.
By the way does anyone know why we need two PCIe x16 slots anymore since SLI is not supported anymore ? Give me a small form factor mATX or ITX board with thunderbolt 4 ports so that I can extend it if needed.
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