Question What’s the deal with MSI’s X570 motherboards?

[BrandonFitzpatricc]

I’ve seen a lot of people talking bad about MSI’s X570 boards and I’m not really sure why. I know that the issue is with their VRM (which I’ll admit I don’t have a great understanding of), but I have the MPG X570 Gaming Pro Carbon WiFi and I personally think one of the best X570 boards on the market. It provides basically everything that you need in an X570 motherboard for $260. And in terms of reviews on newegg, MSI’s boards have significantly more positive reviews in comparison to the X570 boards from ASUS and Gigabyte. I know that MSI has made some mistakes, such as the thermal pads for their evoke GPU, but I feel like the people that are criticizing their X570 motherboards this badly aren’t really being fair. Can someone who’s more educated about this give me some information? I still feel confident about my motherboard purchase, but at the same time I’m a little worried that I might’ve purchased the wrong one. I’m planning to use this board for at least 5 years.

 

[jon96789]

I am in the same situation as you... I also have a MSi X570 MPG Game Pro Carbon Wi-Fi motherboard...

My system comprises of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, MSi RTX2070 Gaming Z video card, a Corsair H115i RGB Platinum AIO cooler, Samsung 1TB 970 Plus M.2 NVME SSD and 32 GB of Corsair 3000 MHz Vengeance DDR-4 RAM.

Here are the VRM specs on all the MSi X570 motherboards...
MEG X570 GODLIKE 18-phase[14+4]*| TDA21472 70A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
PRESTIGE X570 CREATION 16-phase[14+2]*| IR3555 60A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
MEG X570 ACE 14-phase[12+2]*| IR3555 60A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
MPG X570 GAMING PRO CARBON WIFI 12-phase[10+2]*| UBIQ QA3111N6N 56A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
MPG X570 GAMING EDGE WIFI 10-phase[8+2]*| OnSemi NTMFS4C029NT1G/NMMFS4C024NT1G 46A/78A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
MPG X570 GAMING PLUS 10-phase[8+2]*| OnSemi NTMFS4C029NT1G/NMMFS4C024NT1G 46A/78A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
MPG X570-A PRO 10-phase[8+2]*| OnSemi NTMFS4C029NT1G/NMMFS4C024NT1G 46A/78A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)

As you can see, MSi's VRM implementation varies a lot by cost... The GODLIKE has a very good 18-phase VRM which keeps the temps low at about 50 degrees when using a 3900X CPU. OTOH, the Gaming Edge, Gaming Plus and Pro all have 10-phase VRMs. According to Hardware Unboxed, these board's VRMs run very hot, 100+ degrees under load, which can be 30-40 degrees higher than other brands.

You did not say what CPU and what CPU cooling you are using. I don't think you would have to worry about the motherboard throttling down the CPU, but you can expect the board to run a bit hotter than other brands. If you are using a Ryzen CPU that is rated for 65 watts, you can expect your overall temps to be even lower. The VRMs can easily handle a 65-watt CPU. It's when you are using a 95-watt CPU that you will encounter the high temps.

My guess is that the Gaming Pro Carbon's 12-phase VRMs will probably run about 80-90 degrees which is pretty hot... Mind you, the VRMs run hot when under load. Right now, HWinFO64 shows my system VRMs at 43 degrees which is pretty good.

When running Handbrake @ SHQ mode and the PC in AMD Performance mode (in the Control Panel Power Options), the CPU temp rises to 85-95 degrees which is dang hot. The CPU speed increases to 4.475 GHz (my CPU never exceeds 4.5 GHz)... My VRMs hit 90 degrees.

I don't like the temps that high so I changed my Power Options to Power Saver mode. I also cap the CPU speed to 99% or 3.75 GHz. This drops the CPU temps to 66 degrees and the VRMs to75 degrees, a noticeable drop. While 3.75 GHz seems like a big loss, Handbrake is more core sensitive than CPU speed. Another factor is that at 99%, the 12 cores run at 3.75 GHz. At 100%, the average core speed is only 4.3 GHz.

I also opted to have Handbrake use the MSi RTX2070 GPU to do the encoding. It is a lot faster than the CPU and the drop in temps is a lot more, 55 degrees for the CPU and 60-65 degrees for the VRMs.

Hopefully, AMD's and MSi's new BIOS updates expected at the end of the month will address some of these problems. I have installed the latest 7B93V12 BIOS from MSi and found that BIOS to be really buggy. The Control Panel Power Options would no longer affect the CPU and any hardware diagnostics software other than AMD's Ryzen Master gives conflicting results (e.g. CPU Core Temp showed CPU speed as 8.8 GHz and all the temps skyrocketed. I quickly went back to 7B93V11 BIOS.

 

[jon96789]

I forgot mention, I agree with you... Other than the VRM issue, I like the MSi motherboard. It looks nice, runs reliably.

 

[BrandonFitzpatricc]

I am in the same situation as you... I also have a MSi X570 MPG Game Pro Carbon Wi-Fi motherboard...

My system comprises of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, MSi RTX2070 Gaming Z video card, a Corsair H115i RGB Platinum AIO cooler, Samsung 1TB 970 Plus M.2 NVME SSD and 32 GB of Corsair 3000 MHz Vengeance DDR-4 RAM.

Here are the VRM specs on all the MSi X570 motherboards...
MEG X570 GODLIKE 18-phase[14+4]*| TDA21472 70A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
PRESTIGE X570 CREATION 16-phase[14+2]*| IR3555 60A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
MEG X570 ACE 14-phase[12+2]*| IR3555 60A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
MPG X570 GAMING PRO CARBON WIFI 12-phase[10+2]*| UBIQ QA3111N6N 56A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
MPG X570 GAMING EDGE WIFI 10-phase[8+2]*| OnSemi NTMFS4C029NT1G/NMMFS4C024NT1G 46A/78A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
MPG X570 GAMING PLUS 10-phase[8+2]*| OnSemi NTMFS4C029NT1G/NMMFS4C024NT1G 46A/78A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)
MPG X570-A PRO 10-phase[8+2]*| OnSemi NTMFS4C029NT1G/NMMFS4C024NT1G 46A/78A, PWM: IR35201(8-phase)

As you can see, MSi's VRM implementation varies a lot by cost... The GODLIKE has a very good 18-phase VRM which keeps the temps low at about 50 degrees when using a 3900X CPU. OTOH, the Gaming Edge, Gaming Plus and Pro all have 10-phase VRMs. According to Hardware Unboxed, these board's VRMs run very hot, 100+ degrees under load, which can be 30-40 degrees higher than other brands.

You did not say what CPU and what CPU cooling you are using. I don't think you would have to worry about the motherboard throttling down the CPU, but you can expect the board to run a bit hotter than other brands. If you are using a Ryzen CPU that is rated for 65 watts, you can expect your overall temps to be even lower. The VRMs can easily handle a 65-watt CPU. It's when you are using a 95-watt CPU that you will encounter the high temps.

My guess is that the Gaming Pro Carbon's 12-phase VRMs will probably run about 80-90 degrees which is pretty hot... Mind you, the VRMs run hot when under load. Right now, HWinFO64 shows my system VRMs at 43 degrees which is pretty good.

When running Handbrake @ SHQ mode and the PC in AMD Performance mode (in the Control Panel Power Options), the CPU temp rises to 85-95 degrees which is dang hot. The CPU speed increases to 4.475 GHz (my CPU never exceeds 4.5 GHz)... My VRMs hit 90 degrees.

I don't like the temps that high so I changed my Power Options to Power Saver mode. I also cap the CPU speed to 99% or 3.75 GHz. This drops the CPU temps to 66 degrees and the VRMs to75 degrees, a noticeable drop. While 3.75 GHz seems like a big loss, Handbrake is more core sensitive than CPU speed. Another factor is that at 99%, the 12 cores run at 3.75 GHz. At 100%, the average core speed is only 4.3 GHz.

I also opted to have Handbrake use the MSi RTX2070 GPU to do the encoding. It is a lot faster than the CPU and the drop in temps is a lot more, 55 degrees for the CPU and 60-65 degrees for the VRMs.

Hopefully, AMD's and MSi's new BIOS updates expected at the end of the month will address some of these problems. I have installed the latest 7B93V12 BIOS from MSi and found that BIOS to be really buggy. The Control Panel Power Options would no longer affect the CPU and any hardware diagnostics software other than AMD's Ryzen Master gives conflicting results (e.g. CPU Core Temp showed CPU speed as 8.8 GHz and all the temps skyrocketed. I quickly went back to 7B93V11 BIOS.

That's a relief. I have the Ryzen 3700x in my system and it seems to be running surprisingly cool. I use precision boost overdrive to overclock my CPU, and it reached 60 degrees at most during a Ryzen Master stress test. I have it paired with the Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240L. If I had to take a guess, the lacking VRM is probably why this motherboard is only $260, just like the lack of SLI/CrossFire support. I'm not saying it's a bad thing though. I feel like this board would have costed $300+ if it had those features, which seem to be unnecessary if you only have a single GPU and a 65W CPU.

At the moment I only have a blower style GTX 960 that my friend lent me but I'm planning to upgrade to an MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 2070 super or 2080 super soon (I still haven't decided which). My goal is to buy one GPU every 3 years at most, and keep the same CPU and motherboard for the next two GPU's I buy (including the RTX card), which I don't think will be a problem. Based on what you said, I feel like it would probably be smart to upgrade my CPU and motherboard at once, since CPU's with higher TDP's will probably be more common.

Thank you for the information. This is completely unrelated but since you seem to know what you're talking about, I have one more question if you don't mind. Should I raise my memory clock and fabric clock in Ryzen Master? They're currently set at 1800 which all stock/auto settings, but they can go up to 3000 so I'm not sure if I should change that. I'm still new to all of this so I'm mostly learning by trial and error

 

[jon96789]

Sorry, but i don't play any games... I just use my PC for video encodings so over-clocking is not my forte. You can try to raise the memory clock and do a stress test and see if it holds up...

 

[BrandonFitzpatricc]

Sorry, but i don't play any games... I just use my PC for video encodings so over-clocking is not my forte. You can try to raise the memory clock and do a stress test and see if it holds up...

Sorry, but i don't play any games... I just use my PC for video encodings so over-clocking is not my forte. You can try to raise the memory clock and do a stress test and see if it holds up...

Ah I understand, it's all good