X570 Motherboard Recommendations

TerranUp16

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 11, 2007
Messages
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I am doing a rebuild (I know, awful time, but good reasons behind its urgency) based around a Ryzen 5800X. I have usually gone with upper-mid-tier offerings from Asus (my current board is an X370 Prime Pro- which has been... eh), but given the current, weird situation of stock and the overall X570 ecosystem, I wanted to ask [H] for some advice.

It looks like the Asus Dark Hero is getting a decent amount of love here while the Aorus Master is a great deal, but potential train wreck regarding reliability and software. Ideally I'd like to spend around $400 on the board, but at this point I could be talked into going up to the $700 flagship range.

My main priority is stable power delivery. My secondary priority is storage connectivity (which is vague right now as I'm still figuring out how I want to handle storage- leading candidate is getting an add-in card to do 4x gumsticks in RAID 10 for longer-term storage and shifting over my 1TB 970 Evo+ as the OS and gaming drive for now, so may not need traditional storage all that much). Final priority is backpanel IO- the more, the merrier, particularly when it comes to Type-C.

What models are [H] goers liking for X570 Ryzen 5xxx series overall? Any models that Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, etc... are not giving enough limelight to that I should give more consideration to?
 
The dark hero is a great option of you can actually buy one. I have the x570 master 1.0 and it been a great board with no issues. Based off the thread here the no power issue has been quietly fixed.
 
Thank you both for the feedback!

I just found out that an RTX 3090 has fallen into my lap, so my absolute top priority is now stable power delivery above all else- last thing I want is for the motherboard to have an electrical problem that fries a part whose MSRP is 3-4x its own. While I'm encouraged by vegeta's response, reading through the totality of the Aorus Master thread... I don't think it's worth risking.

There are some Dark Heroes going for around $650 from a place I'd otherwise never consider excepting the current circumstances. At this point... I think that's worth it. But due diligence- looks like there are Crosshair VIII Formulas (Formulae? xD) going for MSRP. Dark Hero is newer and has passive chipset cooling, Formula otherwise looks better- obviously, active chipset cooling is a major drawback for the Formula, but comparing a Formula bought for $50 less from a more reputable retailer to a Dark Hero purchased from a less reputable retailer... which would [H] go with?
 
Thank you both for the feedback!

I just found out that an RTX 3090 has fallen into my lap, so my absolute top priority is now stable power delivery above all else- last thing I want is for the motherboard to have an electrical problem that fries a part whose MSRP is 3-4x its own. While I'm encouraged by vegeta's response, reading through the totality of the Aorus Master thread... I don't think it's worth risking.

There are some Dark Heroes going for around $650 from a place I'd otherwise never consider excepting the current circumstances. At this point... I think that's worth it. But due diligence- looks like there are Crosshair VIII Formulas (Formulae? xD) going for MSRP. Dark Hero is newer and has passive chipset cooling, Formula otherwise looks better- obviously, active chipset cooling is a major drawback for the Formula, but comparing a Formula bought for $50 less from a more reputable retailer to a Dark Hero purchased from a less reputable retailer... which would [H] go with?
Don't blame you one bit shying away from the master. I honestly would go with the formula instead of over paying for the dark by $200. The chipset fan is a none issue. I have never noticed it running with a 5950x. If you have good airflow it should never come on. At worst it will spin at a very quiet low rpm.
 
Thank 'e. Getting closer, but I noticed a NewEgg review where someone using a Noctua D15 had clearance issues with a GTX 1080 installed in the first PCI-E slot (and there may be general issues with the idea of only being able to use the second slot). I have a D15 AM4 edition I'm planning on shifting over, and looking at my current setup, there isn't much clearance between it and my current GPU. Looking at pictures of the Formula versus the Dark Hero, it looks like the Dark Hero has some extra clearance thanks to a passive heatsink sitting between the CPU and GPU that should be low enough to sit under the D15.

If the Formula plus a new heatsink is still an overall better pathway forward than an overpriced Dark Hero, that is fine, though would need to figure out what heatsink would make sense. Here is the quote from the review fwiw-
Cons: A couple of design issues prevent things from fitting 100%....specifically....

1. The m2 slot sits under the second PCIe slot. This probably would not have been a problem, but my m2 drive had an installed HS, so if I had tried to put the GPU into this slot the GPU HSF would not have cleared the m2 drive heatsink. Also the m2 coverplate will not fit back on if you get an m2 drive with a HS, I just left it off, don't think this is terrible. Not really a big deal...except it exposed issue #2

2. Had to mount GPU in slot 1, fine no problem....except that I had a Noctua DH-15 ...that HS was too wide based upon the location of the cpu. If the board had been designed with the cpu 2 mm to the north it would have cleared GPU, but as it was the HS is right up against the GPU backplate, and I couldn't install the fan. I switched out to a corsair A500 and it fit (running cool and quiet, but their are some sub-optimal issues with A500 also -- I lapped the A500 though and seemed to improve the interface)

Some extra commentary is offered later about this being a board designed for watercooling and looking at the CPU area, I'd probably agree. I've been tempted to try an AIO for awhile, but keep balking as I honestly don't see much of a benefit for the CPUs I'm running with and mostly just see the disbenefit of a silent pump failure causing early failure.

Anyone else tried this heatsink and motherboard combo and had any issues or find any creative workarounds? Alternately, and I can ask this in the appropriate forum, but any recommendations on an air cooling heatsink that wouldn't have issues with horizontal clearance (I'll look more into this on my end as well, but never hurts to ask [H])?
 
Or maybe I'm overthinking all of this and I should just grab a second Strix X570-E (got one in late 2019 to build my wife a rig centered on a Ryzen 3800X) and call it a day.
 
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You could go pick up another ASUS Strix X570-E TerranUp16 but the one thing I'd like to know if you're still looking for a new X570 motherboard are the answers to 2 questions: 1. How much do you want to spend? 2. Aside from effective and stable power delivery do you have anything else on your wish list spec-wise? Write back with your thought if you're still looking. Thanks and until next time I am out!
 
Thank you!

$400.00 is the ideal price point, but I'm willing to go higher given the circumstances (capping around $700).

Ideally, would like the board's layout to work well for my Noctua D15 AM4. Would like at least 8 USB ports on the back panel, at least one of which is Type-C. Haven't decided on a case yet, but ideally looking for one supporting at least one Type-C port up front so ideally looking for a motherboard capable of enabling that. For future-proofing purposes, would like 2x PCI-E 4.0 x4 M.2 slots which support RAID 1. Passive chipset cooling preferred as the GTX 3090 is going to dominate most of the air space where X570 chipset fans seem to get located these days, but if the board has active cooling and is designed well enough to avoid having problems with big GPUs, then that's fine. For networking, I don't need Wi-Fi, but I would like Bluetooth 5 for phone purposes. For LAN, I don't need anything greater than GigE, but for GigE heavily prefer an Intel controller over a Realtek.
 
MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE
MSI MEG X570 Unify
MSI X570 Tomahawk
GIGABYTE X570 Aorus Master
GIGABYTE X570 Aorus Xtreme
ASUS Crosshair VIII Formula
ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero
ASUS Dark Hero

There are a few more I can't think of right now.
 
The MSI X570 Creation that I have is one of the few boards that will have that many USB plus a C on the IO port. That was one of the many reasons I went with it when I built my current system.
 
There are 3 more I can add to Dan_D's list:

MSI MEG X570 Ace
ASROCK X570 Taichi
ASROCK X570 PG Velocita

Out!
 
When you say "4 gumsticks in raid 10" - you talking NVMe drives? Because you only have ONE x16 slot on x570 - if you use more, they're at x8 or at x4, depending - which means your card has to have a PLX chip (or its own raid controller onboard). If you want more, you're looking at HEDT rather than x570 - or those very fancy cards indeed.

To your second post - with that many USB, I'd turn to the X570 creation as well - same reason I almost bought one (ended up going threadripper instead in the end), but I had similar needs.
 
Thank 'e, everyone, for the excellent recommendations!

Starfalcon, the X570 Creation looks great. Looks like NewEgg has it for $500 right now which would make it cheaper than the Crosshair Formula and would address the heatsink compatibility issue (it tosses a PCI-E 1x slot between the CPU and first x16 slot so worst-case... I lose one of like four 1x slots which is not a problem at all). Not seeing anyone reporting known-persistent problems with it or anything, and that chipset fan positioning (probably thanks to E-ATX) is excellent and will avoid competing with the RTX 3090.

When you say "4 gumsticks in raid 10" - you talking NVMe drives? Because you only have ONE x16 slot on x570 - if you use more, they're at x8 or at x4, depending - which means your card has to have a PLX chip (or its own raid controller onboard). If you want more, you're looking at HEDT rather than x570 - or those very fancy cards indeed.
I'm still working on figuring out the IO architecture. Threadripper would be the easy solution, but I'd have to give up Zen 3 for that. My two, primary workloads at this point are-
  1. Work, which mostly occurs in a combo of Vivaldi web browser with a god-awful number of tabs open and VS Code (usually with a few tabs open, often with multi-GB log files from MariaDB open)
    1. I do run Docker Desktop and WSL a decent bit to reproduce issues and run testing, but using a local setup for this is mostly a matter of convenience- my job lets me spin-up AWS VMs at-will with basically unlimited specs, so while the idea of having a 32-core TR w/128GB RAM setup locally to run a local Kubernetes cluster to avoid bothering with AWS would be nice... in reality my 1700X w/32GB DDR4 has been plenty adequate for the local use-cases I have
  2. Gaming
Also worth mentioning those Docker Desktop workloads are mostly targeting MariaDB, which Zen 3 is a nice boost for-
(granted, more cores are still better cores for that use-case)

Main point is Zen 3 should fit my overall workloads better. In an ideal world I'd have targeted a 5900X or 5950X, but when I saw the 5800X going for MSRP, given the urgent need I just snapped that up (worst-case it sounds like AMD may do a Zen 3 Refresh release as the final hurrah for AM4 so if the stock situation improves by then and 8 cores is proving limiting, I'll consider upgrading to a 12 or 16-core variant of that).

My realistic guesses on where my IO setup will end up at-
  1. Most-likely thing is a nice, mature PCI-E 4.0 x4 drive will come out that I'll grab to serve as an active gaming drive or as the primary Windows drive, and my current 970 Evo Plus will shift to being a dedicated OneDrive... drive (it's 1TB, I have 1TB of OneDrive storage, sounds like a good fit, lol). I'll probably just end up caving and doing something icky like RAID 10 2TB SATA SSDs to make a storage array to consolidate about two decades' worth of random storage drives' data; more realistically, I'll use Storage Spaces to setup such a thing
  2. I'll take my 1700X, get it into a smaller chassis, and set it up as a 'nix fileserver using BTRFS or ZFS (this would be the ideal, smart thing to do for this, but I haven't figured out where I'd put this even if I crammed it into an ITX form factor)
  3. I'll get properly adventurous and find an addon card that takes up to four gumsticks and internally handles RAID so it's just a PCI-E 4.0 x4 card as far as the mobo has to concern itself with (if I set that up in RAID 10 using PCI-E 3.0 x4 drives I'd lose 50% of read throughput to maximum bus bandwidth, but that wouldn't be a big deal for the use-case it would be serving)
At the end of the day, SATA SSDs would be fine, my biggest gripe there has been a lack of confidence in the SATA SSD ecosystem long-term, so since the point would be to easily swap a fresh one in case of failure, that might be harder or more expensive down the road. But there's probably a better argument that I'm being silly and the major stratification in nVME drives based on PCI-E generation support is a bigger barrier for that even if M.2 as a whole will be a more ripe ecosystem long-term.
 
Meh, NVMe stratification isn’t an issue. You’re all good- just making sure you weren’t making the common mistake of assuming any x16 slot could do x16 on consumer platforms.
 
I ended up pulling the trigger on the MSI PRESTIGE X570 CREATION. Moving on now to finding qualified RAM (probably needs to be this as the D15 AM4 is still going to require tiny-ass RAM modules; waiting to see if NewEgg gets more back in-stock tomorrow and will honor that deal still though) and figuring out PSU (looking at what 1000W modular unit is available and will work best; on the "plus" side the 3090 variant I have coming uses 3x 8-pin instead of the 12-pin, so other than keeping an eye out for 2x 8-pin CPU connectors, don't have to worry about too much cable-wise for the PSU). Also gotta figure case out still, but this is probably one of the rare times I will be picking the case to fit the components instead of the other way around.

Thank you everyone here for all your help! I'll try to post some follow-ups with my experiences with the new mobo to give some feedback someone else may find helpful down the road.
 
Thank 'e, everyone, for the excellent recommendations!

Starfalcon, the X570 Creation looks great. Looks like NewEgg has it for $500 right now which would make it cheaper than the Crosshair Formula and would address the heatsink compatibility issue (it tosses a PCI-E 1x slot between the CPU and first x16 slot so worst-case... I lose one of like four 1x slots which is not a problem at all). Not seeing anyone reporting known-persistent problems with it or anything, and that chipset fan positioning (probably thanks to E-ATX) is excellent and will avoid competing with the RTX 3090.


I'm still working on figuring out the IO architecture. Threadripper would be the easy solution, but I'd have to give up Zen 3 for that. My two, primary workloads at this point are-
  1. Work, which mostly occurs in a combo of Vivaldi web browser with a god-awful number of tabs open and VS Code (usually with a few tabs open, often with multi-GB log files from MariaDB open)
    1. I do run Docker Desktop and WSL a decent bit to reproduce issues and run testing, but using a local setup for this is mostly a matter of convenience- my job lets me spin-up AWS VMs at-will with basically unlimited specs, so while the idea of having a 32-core TR w/128GB RAM setup locally to run a local Kubernetes cluster to avoid bothering with AWS would be nice... in reality my 1700X w/32GB DDR4 has been plenty adequate for the local use-cases I have
  2. Gaming
Also worth mentioning those Docker Desktop workloads are mostly targeting MariaDB, which Zen 3 is a nice boost for-
(granted, more cores are still better cores for that use-case)

Main point is Zen 3 should fit my overall workloads better. In an ideal world I'd have targeted a 5900X or 5950X, but when I saw the 5800X going for MSRP, given the urgent need I just snapped that up (worst-case it sounds like AMD may do a Zen 3 Refresh release as the final hurrah for AM4 so if the stock situation improves by then and 8 cores is proving limiting, I'll consider upgrading to a 12 or 16-core variant of that).

My realistic guesses on where my IO setup will end up at-
  1. Most-likely thing is a nice, mature PCI-E 4.0 x4 drive will come out that I'll grab to serve as an active gaming drive or as the primary Windows drive, and my current 970 Evo Plus will shift to being a dedicated OneDrive... drive (it's 1TB, I have 1TB of OneDrive storage, sounds like a good fit, lol). I'll probably just end up caving and doing something icky like RAID 10 2TB SATA SSDs to make a storage array to consolidate about two decades' worth of random storage drives' data; more realistically, I'll use Storage Spaces to setup such a thing
  2. I'll take my 1700X, get it into a smaller chassis, and set it up as a 'nix fileserver using BTRFS or ZFS (this would be the ideal, smart thing to do for this, but I haven't figured out where I'd put this even if I crammed it into an ITX form factor)
  3. I'll get properly adventurous and find an addon card that takes up to four gumsticks and internally handles RAID so it's just a PCI-E 4.0 x4 card as far as the mobo has to concern itself with (if I set that up in RAID 10 using PCI-E 3.0 x4 drives I'd lose 50% of read throughput to maximum bus bandwidth, but that wouldn't be a big deal for the use-case it would be serving)
At the end of the day, SATA SSDs would be fine, my biggest gripe there has been a lack of confidence in the SATA SSD ecosystem long-term, so since the point would be to easily swap a fresh one in case of failure, that might be harder or more expensive down the road. But there's probably a better argument that I'm being silly and the major stratification in nVME drives based on PCI-E generation support is a bigger barrier for that even if M.2 as a whole will be a more ripe ecosystem long-term.

Glad my recomendation fit what you were looking for, Ive been nothing but happy with mine that I built back in nov 19. Its been absolutely stable and problem free for me. Also if you didnt notice the board also comes with a PCIe X8 M2 card that holds 2 drives. With the 2 onboard you can use up to 4 drives.
 
I ended up pulling the trigger on the MSI PRESTIGE X570 CREATION. Moving on now to finding qualified RAM (probably needs to be this as the D15 AM4 is still going to require tiny-ass RAM modules; waiting to see if NewEgg gets more back in-stock tomorrow and will honor that deal still though) and figuring out PSU (looking at what 1000W modular unit is available and will work best; on the "plus" side the 3090 variant I have coming uses 3x 8-pin instead of the 12-pin, so other than keeping an eye out for 2x 8-pin CPU connectors, don't have to worry about too much cable-wise for the PSU). Also gotta figure case out still, but this is probably one of the rare times I will be picking the case to fit the components instead of the other way around.

Thank you everyone here for all your help! I'll try to post some follow-ups with my experiences with the new mobo to give some feedback someone else may find helpful down the road.

If your case has extra clearance you can always move up the D15's RAM facing fan for additional RAM clearance. If you can't imagine it, you're basically moving the fan away from the board but closer to the side panel of your ccase.

Otherwise, there are the Corsair LPX and the Crucial Ballistix modules
 
If your case has extra clearance you can always move up the D15's RAM facing fan for additional RAM clearance. If you can't imagine it, you're basically moving the fan away from the board but closer to the side panel of your ccase.

Otherwise, there are the Corsair LPX and the Crucial Ballistix modules

You can always not use the front fan as well; the difference in performance isn't much, though I'm not sure if running a single fan will spin it up higher.
 
I used a NH-D15 heatsink on my build, cleared my dominator ram with plenty of clearance. About the only thing I did was switch the front fan to the back of the heatsink, mainly do I could see my sticks through the window and not have them blocked by the fan. It was a little tight in the rear due to the very large VRM heatsink assembly, but I just moved it up a few notches and it fit fine.
 
I just did a build with the MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk and a 5800X. Very impressed with it's performance. VRM temps are phenominal
 
Also if you didnt notice the board also comes with a PCIe X8 M2 card that holds 2 drives. With the 2 onboard you can use up to 4 drives.
Oh, I definitely noticed ;) I am keeping myself unexcited about it to keep expectations low until I dive deeper on it and figure out how I want to move forward for storage, but it definitely immediately slotted into the, "nice to have" category and helped seal the Creation's position.

If your case has extra clearance you can always move up the D15's RAM facing fan for additional RAM clearance. If you can't imagine it, you're basically moving the fan away from the board but closer to the side panel of your ccase.

Otherwise, there are the Corsair LPX and the Crucial Ballistix modules
Amazingly, I still have the D15's fan shifted up in my current 1700X build despite having Corsair LPX modules. I haven't chosen a case yet so I will be aiming for one that has enough clearance to allow a decent amount of fan shifting. I found compatible Corsair LPX DIMMs, but they're out-of-stock right now. I also noticed the SL line which splits the difference between the RGB Vengeance line and the LPX line- not seeing those as being flagged as being compatible with the X570 Creation, so probably will play it safe with the LPX (even though the SL would probably work fine and are just new enough they haven't gotten to validation against the Creation yet) modules when they come back in stock.

I used a NH-D15 heatsink on my build, cleared my dominator ram with plenty of clearance. About the only thing I did was switch the front fan to the back of the heatsink, mainly do I could see my sticks through the window and not have them blocked by the fan. It was a little tight in the rear due to the very large VRM heatsink assembly, but I just moved it up a few notches and it fit fine.
This might be worth considering tbh. I vaguely remember being more concerned about airflow around the CPU socket when I built my last rig, but it looks like MSI's design for the Creation doesn't really need that, so could definitely consider shifting the fans to the back.

Obviously, the real solution here is to find a way to get a set of 120mm fan clips (Noctua's site says they have fan mounting compatible for 120mm fans) and get a 120mm Silverstone Air Blazer to mount in front which should clear the RAM without issue and let the Noctua 140mm fans do the rest. I sound sarcastic here, but honestly this is tempting, lol. My main hang-up is I suspect from an actual airflow standpoint this would push air over the fins too quickly and would under-utilize any fins underneath the bottom of the 120mm fan.
 
The creation has a massive VRM and will not even really get warm, so you dont need to worry about that. As for the heatsink, 3 fans is prob overcool unless your doing some serious overclocking. That noctua keeps mine cool with 2 fans without an issue.
 

Follow-up​

The X570 Prestige Creation started well. It actually came with Rev 7C36v1B BIOS out-of-box, so I didn't have any issues dropping my Ryzen 7 5800X in and getting everything going. While the board waited until the physical manual to advertise that MSI offers a PCI-E support brace they recommend buying and using for heavy cards like the RTX 3090 (and having that in-hand now... yeah, this is definitely one of those cards where the fears of PCBs snapping like twigs are very well-founded), the board has handled the massive sucker just fine. The only real issues I had were well-known-
  • AMD USB issues made for some occasional mouse lag and other wonk (I don't think I ever encountered it while gaming though so was only really an issue on video calls for work where I was screen sharing; I also felt like general chipset communication had issues from this problem as well as chipset-connected drives and other devices sometimes hung for ~5-10 seconds briefly)
  • Resizable BAR support is in Rev 7C36v1C which wasn't worth risking a BIOS update for
  • Sometimes I'd power-on the system and everything would get power but display wouldn't come up- holding the power button down to turn it off and then turning it back on was 100% successful, so it wasn't a big deal
Fast-forward to yesterday and I'm handling my monthly rig maintenance. I noticed that Rev 7C36v1D BIOS, which contain the fix for the AMD USB issues, were now stable, so I decided, "Now's the time to go for that BIOS update".

This was apparently an awful idea. Everything appeared to go well until the update finished and the system automatically rebooted. And now all it will do is what it used to do on the "false-starts", except it never actually starts correctly now. The digital read-out on the board is showing F8, which looking online basically means, "Whelp, your BIOS are probably corrupted, 'cuz this is an error that occurs very early in the boot process." I contacted MSI right away and have been doing everything recommended from them, from basic computer-ownership sense, and from other MSI users who ran into similar issues (short version of that- try the Reset CMOS button; if no dice on that, short the J_BAT jumper for ~10 seconds instead and try that; if no dice there, pop out the CMOS battery for at least a minute before putting it back in; if no dice there, try dropping down to bare minimum components and/or swapping components if feasible; if no dice... RMA).

Frustratingly, despite being a premium board, the X570 Prestige Creation has no dual BIOS nor BIOS Flashback functionality (nor any way to flash the BIOS without needing to boot into UEFI), any of which such functionality would offer an immediate and easy fix for this problem. Given the apparently rough state of MSI's software for this, I have to recommend [H] buyers beware with this board, and recognize that updating firmware on it is about as risky as it gets- so have a backup plan ready in case something goes wrong, or choose a board with better BIOS resiliency options.

I'm at the point now of asking MSI if they have any pathway forward on this that doesn't involve a traditional RMA. I'll update here if they get back to me with such an option. Hedging they won't though, I've ordered an Asus Dark Hero off Amazon that's supposed to ship between June 23-28. My plan at this point is to use whatever board ends up in my hands and functioning first.

Wondering if anyone [H]ere has run into similar issues with MSI boards and if anyone has recommendations worth trying before going forward w/MSI RMA.
 
Unless by some miracle your board has a replaceable bios chip. Nope. RMA is all thats left.
Every board today particularly a high end mb should come with dual bios/bios flash back as standard. I just assumed that they would. Its beyond me why a manufacturer wouldnt implement something so valuable to both their customers AND themselves? Foolish oversight.
Just one more thing to research apparently.
 
Unless by some miracle your board has a replaceable bios chip. Nope. RMA is all thats left.
Every board today particularly a high end mb should come with dual bios/bios flash back as standard. I just assumed that they would. Its beyond me why a manufacturer wouldnt implement something so valuable to both their customers AND themselves? Foolish oversight.
Just one more thing to research apparently.
Yeah, this has been my take-away. Definitely going to be making dual BIOS and/or flashback an absolute requirement from now-on. I am surprised that the chips aren't replaceable these days tbh. I'd imagine it's out of concern for security, but honestly I would be quite happy with just a simple, physical key that comes w/the mobo that locks/unlocks it.

Ty for your feedback!
 
Unless by some miracle your board has a replaceable bios chip. Nope. RMA is all thats left.
Every board today particularly a high end mb should come with dual bios/bios flash back as standard. I just assumed that they would. Its beyond me why a manufacturer wouldnt implement something so valuable to both their customers AND themselves? Foolish oversight.
Just one more thing to research apparently.
Except when they don't work. I think I just cooked mine (Zenith II Extreme Alpha) with the clear CMOS button (was trying to force a trip to BIOS), and now it just throws similar errors. And the flashback? Doesn't work either :(
 
Except when they don't work. I think I just cooked mine (Zenith II Extreme Alpha) with the clear CMOS button (was trying to force a trip to BIOS), and now it just throws similar errors. And the flashback? Doesn't work either :(
That's awful =(

Got ahold of MSI via livechat today as they hadn't responded to the ticket since Saturday. They confirmed a mythical tool capable of solving this problem by enabling force-flashing of the BIOS exists... but they only give it to authorized repair centers and in the US they only have given it to centers in Northern California (SOL here in FL). Again, I get that it's technically a physical access-level security risk... but there are ways to mitigate that, including basic methods such as enabling CRC or similar checks to provide a canary for when unexpected changes have taken place. The value to consumers of having access to this imo far outweighs the concerns.

But in any case, they are effectively reiterating that traditional RMA is the only remedy they are offering, so not very happy with MSI right now.
 
Latest update is the Dark Hero arrived ahead of schedule, so just a under a week after my last post I got the MSI swapped-out and the Asus swapped-in.

Have to credit Asus that there isn't much of a drop in overall connectivity and available board space dropping from EATX to ATX- MSI gave a little more space between the primary GPU slot and CPU socket which accommodated my Noctua heatsink better, but even with the RTX 3090's thick back plate, everything fits fine on the Dark Hero.

Overall system stability feels better (it already felt good with the Creation and I had attributed the issues to the AMD USB problems, but unless I'm missing something while my Dark Hero is running the latest-stable BIOS, it doesn't look like this BIOS revision includes the fixes for that but I've not run into any problems on it), minus a weird thing where ~33% of the time booting into Windows will take 1-2 minutes (not blaming Asus on this yet as it's probably leftover cruft from MSI drivers or something that I've failed to purge and I haven't yet done a clean reinstall of Windows 10). Only complaint is while the lack of a chipset fan is great for long-term maintenance, it is not as great for cooling my 2TB 980 Pro (which runs between 50 and 60C despite using a high-intake case with the Meshify 2 XL with Fractal's fans subbed-out for Silverstone Air Blazers).

All told, if the X570 Creation and X570 Dark Hero are available for similar $, I'd pick the Dark Hero. I just do kinda wish Asus had considered a fan for the M.2 slots or done more work to setup the chipset heatsink to channel case intake air towards the M.2 slots (not really sure it would work well, but I'm personally considering trying to mod my case to get some smaller-diameter fans to mount between the motherboard and front intake to rechannel some of the front airflow towards the M.2 heatsinks).

Also would love if one of these motherboard manufacturers would invest some time in re-architecting how PCI-E latching works. I know it's mostly my own "fault" for using a beefy air cooler like the Noctua D15, but especially with "thermal armor" becoming more of a thing as we go to PCI-E v4 and I can only imagine what v5 will be like, finding ways to thread tools to safely find and apply pressure to the PCI-E slot latches which are now buried in "armor" is becoming increasingly difficult and fraught.
 
Latest update is the Dark Hero arrived ahead of schedule, so just a under a week after my last post I got the MSI swapped-out and the Asus swapped-in.

Have to credit Asus that there isn't much of a drop in overall connectivity and available board space dropping from EATX to ATX- MSI gave a little more space between the primary GPU slot and CPU socket which accommodated my Noctua heatsink better, but even with the RTX 3090's thick back plate, everything fits fine on the Dark Hero.

Overall system stability feels better (it already felt good with the Creation and I had attributed the issues to the AMD USB problems, but unless I'm missing something while my Dark Hero is running the latest-stable BIOS, it doesn't look like this BIOS revision includes the fixes for that but I've not run into any problems on it), minus a weird thing where ~33% of the time booting into Windows will take 1-2 minutes (not blaming Asus on this yet as it's probably leftover cruft from MSI drivers or something that I've failed to purge and I haven't yet done a clean reinstall of Windows 10). Only complaint is while the lack of a chipset fan is great for long-term maintenance, it is not as great for cooling my 2TB 980 Pro (which runs between 50 and 60C despite using a high-intake case with the Meshify 2 XL with Fractal's fans subbed-out for Silverstone Air Blazers).

All told, if the X570 Creation and X570 Dark Hero are available for similar $, I'd pick the Dark Hero. I just do kinda wish Asus had considered a fan for the M.2 slots or done more work to setup the chipset heatsink to channel case intake air towards the M.2 slots (not really sure it would work well, but I'm personally considering trying to mod my case to get some smaller-diameter fans to mount between the motherboard and front intake to rechannel some of the front airflow towards the M.2 heatsinks).

Also would love if one of these motherboard manufacturers would invest some time in re-architecting how PCI-E latching works. I know it's mostly my own "fault" for using a beefy air cooler like the Noctua D15, but especially with "thermal armor" becoming more of a thing as we go to PCI-E v4 and I can only imagine what v5 will be like, finding ways to thread tools to safely find and apply pressure to the PCI-E slot latches which are now buried in "armor" is becoming increasingly difficult and fraught.
Chopstick. Works perfectly for releasing the latch. Guarantee it
 
I have a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Ultra motherboard which is the cheapest X570 which retails for $210, but you can go for Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme motherboard, which goes for $800 that one comes with thunderbolt 4 and comprehensive water-cooling abilities.
I'd love to see a link for that at $210. (Not being snarky. I've used 3 of them for builds.)
 
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