Thanks for the great review!
I guess this is a solid competitor of its class. There are few minor flaws, like the lack of CMOS reset button on the rear and those dull M.2 covers. Asus did a good job here overall. Some smart moves like splitting the Fan headers across the board and providing the SATA ports in a 90º placement helps with cable management, maintenance, air flow and even aesthetics. I get the feeling that there are some disposable things that could get the price a little lower, hence the video outputs and the heatsinks-everywhere approach should be revisited. Each mobo of this tier tend to offer somewhat distinct set of features. This one clearly appeals to the all USB3.x and 8 SATA ports while very budget-oriented.
I was expecting an even more detailed analysis over the Power Delivery solution implemented on this mobo. I'm far from an expert, but Asus seems to adopt rather different scheme than other brands while not using doublers nor true independent phases either. Following power stage MOSFETs are rated to higher current and lower voltage in a two-per-phase design against the "true independent 12+2 phase" with one-per-phase MOSFET on the similarly priced Gigabyte Aorus Master. I wanted to see how either solution would fare against each other concerning stability and overclocking capabilities as there is too few updated info regarding this theme. The recent Aorus Master review pointed a slightly lower clock on (apparentely) the same piece of 3700X, but I think that are much more to be covered. I would like to know how the same CPU and RAM can be OC'd on each board with same voltage would be useful.
There are lots of issues I dislike about this trending marketing side of components and all mobos are included. Options are scarce for high-performance full-feature parts that doesn't add up a ton of aesthetic, illumination, bundled RGB and further RGB support, military, racing, gaming themes, with everything glowing. I always have to choose between getting features or getting plain elegant looks. That just proves that brands have terrible tastes. I really wanted to see the same products sporting sleek clean visuals versions, with no RGB whatsoever. The sole offer from Asus is the professional-grade with WS X570-ACE, but on higher price point than this Strix X570E, yet not as capable feature-wise. They just push this garbage along with their finest products to inflate prices and this is ridiculous. When those manufacturers mix that policy with this new platform we are presented to this inflated price scenario for Mobos. The cheapest X570 Mobos came with an outrageous MRSP US$200 that adds up nothing but PCIe4 and a always weird chipset fan. Many of those entry-level Mobos offer below average VRMs, USB/Sata/Fan ports count, connectivity options, with terrible Audio codecs. Speaking of PCIe4, the bandwidth uplift is useful only for already-announced-yet-soon-to-be-released SSDs, not even the recently launched GPUs will benefit from it. Previous generation Mobos with similar perks at launch were found for half the current price and that is infuriating. Opting to ditch my then US$150 Mobo will cost me US$300 to keep specs alike. This is roughly the distance between a 3700X and a 3900X.
With that in mind, I would like to suggest if you could provide us with more extensive analysis when pairing the new Zen2 arch with the mainstream boards equipped with older gen chipsets, like the B350, B450, X370 and X470. There's few content of the matter and, at least for me, it will be extremely useful. I was totally on the hype for Zen2 and was planning to replace my 2 years old 1700 with a 3700X. I didn't get one yet mostly because of availability and price of Mobos in my region and now I'm not even considering the X570 platform anymore. I guess many users are facing the same dilemma now.
Cheers!
We have someone working on that for you.
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