Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsGreat motherboard, no Lan when both NVMe slots used.
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2021
Edit: I have discovered some issues that required a thorough physical inspection. First, I got this used, for a really cheap price plus the VRM heatsink was loose and wobbly, and that should have warned me. But what prompted me to look was the fact that my computer would not come out of sleep mode, and I would loose functionality in the OS and connection to the Video card resulting in artifacting when it would return. Turns out, the board I got had several small capacitors taken off of the board, and one that was damaged and hanging off of the traces. This wasn't something I was expecting either, as it took observation and you could tell that there was a component in those missing spots. Each VRM phase had 2 caps on the bottom three of those phases was missing just the one side, the redundancy of this board though being a 4 by 4 (not a 4+4=8 phase) allowed this error to not show. Moreover, there was missing caps that looked like they were cut away and one of those cut was not successful so it was pried to the side. This explains a few things, like why USB was intermittent, why I had issues with some of my sata ports, why the PCIE based ethernet didn't even show despite there being a redundancy on the board for that too. (Which could explain why it would also drop out on some people who got non-tampered with boards.) The board its' self it well designed, so I am still giving it a 3, but I replaced this board after finding out that someone took advantage of the return policy just so that they could part this out discretely likely to rebuild another board likely. My fault for buying a board that was sub 80 when I picked it up when it retails for much much more and sells used for 30 dollars more usually. I switched though to a MSI B550 Gaming Plus, but I am sad I no longer get the same audio solution this has.
My only issue with this board is the fact that lan does not work when both NVMe slots are used. Part of me wonders if this is because I also have a AX200 installed in the one PCIE slot.
Sound on this board is great, offering clear sound. I think most of this is the codec used from realtek, a alc1200 unit, but there may be something with those red caps often used in good DACs. The alc1220 may be a better codec, but only if you use the extra features and I do not.
The layout on this board is better than on my old X370-Gaming-X-K7 motherboard from gigabyte. That old board looked amazing, but I couldn't put in a NVMe with a heatsink as it would often not clear the GPU. In this case, the PCIE 4 NVME slot is above the GPU and my PCIE with a short heatsink fits under the GPU. The heatsink that comes with this board bows though and did not give good contact to the NVMe I installed so I opted for a 3rd party unit and it still looks amazing. The heatsink for nvme that comes with this only touched the last nand chip and the chipset leaving nothing else cooled by it.
The RGB on this is mediocre at best, but offers loads of expansion with RGB headers found at the top and bottom. I have this hooked into a RGB hub provided by my seasonic power supply expanding it even further. But onboard lights are partially hidden and while I am ok with this, others may want more rainbow puke. The RGB software though needs some love. It registered my Ram at first, then after a reset, no longer registers my ram so it just does the rainbow effect. I have not been able to fix this though I did not try switching slots.
Overall, I am happy, but I really wish I could have that 2.5 gbps lan.
