The AMD X570 Motherboard Overview: Over 35+ Motherboards Analyzed
by Gavin Bonshor on July 9, 2019 8:00 AM ESTASRock X570 Creator
The ASRock X570 Creator is geared towards content creators with a similar feature set to the flagship ASRock X570 Aqua, but without the focus on high-end aesthetics, and water cooling. The X570 Creator has a simplistic and elegant theme with silver heatsinks, with black contrast.
Its X570 heatsink is actively cooled, and incorporates an M.2 heatsink, with a standalone heatsink for the top slot; the top M.2 slot supports PCIe 4.0 x4 and SATA, while the bottom slot is geared for just PCIe 4.0 x4 drives. For SATA there are a total of eight ports. On the PCIe front, there are three full-length PCIe 4.0 slots which run at x16/x8/x8, and x8/x8/x4, as well as three PCIe 4.0 x1 slots.
For memory, the ASRock X570 Creator has four slots with support for up to DDR4-4666 which remains to be seen if it will be effective or not in terms of performance. The X570 Creator also sports a 14-phase power delivery which is consistent with ASRock's other high-end offerings and has 8-pin plus 4-pin i12 V ATX CPU power inputs for delivering power to the processor. The feature set of the ASRock X570 Creator is similar to its other premium X570 models, but the main difference is primarily in the aesthetic. A cleaner, more professional look, without as much flash and pizazz. This mode has two PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, with a total of eight SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, and 10 arrays. A debug LED is located just below the X570 chipset heatsink, and next to these is an onboard power and reset switch.
With the ASRock X570 Creator being one of its more higher-end models, it has two rear panel Thunderbolt 3 Type-C ports. with an Aquantia AQC107 10 G LAN port, an Intel Gigabit port, Intel's AX200 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6 interface, and two USB 3.1 G2 Type-A, as well as four rear-panel USB 3.1 G1 Type-A. It also has two DisplayPorts with an input, and output, as well as one HDMI video output.
The ASRock X570 Creator comes in with an MSRP of $500 which for a premium feature set and everything on offer, it's not a bad price. There are other boards which cost slightly less with similar feature sets, but the Aquantia AQC107 10 G NIC, support for NVIDIA two-way SLI, and dual Thunderbolt 3 Type-C ports on the rear panel all add cost to the board.
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The_Assimilator - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Nope, I really do need that many USB ports! In the past I've used various add-in cards and hubs to achieve this, but my experiences with these devices, and their drivers, and compatibility has been spotty at best, and they also take up space or PCIe slots - hence why I'd much prefer if it was all just integrated on the board.Just to be clear, I don't need 10 USB 3 ports - 8 USB 3 and a pair of 2.0 would be perfect. Considering almost all of these boards have a pair of USB 2.0 headers for 4 ports in total, but cases today don't offer more than a single USB 2.0 front-panel connector - plus that these boards' IO panels have plenty of extra room - I don't see why manufacturers can't drop one of those headers and just give us an extra two rear 2.0 ports as standard.
Qasar - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
why not pick up a usb header to slot plate adapter, im sure you have unused card openings on the back of your case under the video cardDanNeely - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
More ports on the back mean fewer available headers for internal connections. x570 has 12 total USB 3.x ports; so most boards maxing out at 8 on the back and 2 headers (2 ports/header) internal seems about right. Going higher means adding either USB3 controller chips (eats PCIe lanes but gives independent ports for greater total system throughput) or on board USB3 hubs; both of which drive up costs. With making the boards PCIe4 capable already driving up costs a lot the board makers are looking to economize elsewhere.shabby - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
I noticed the cheap asrock boards have 8 usb3 ports in the back.plonk420 - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
THANK YOU SO MUCH for the VRM information! i don't even OC but i like to keep an eye on what VRMs boards are using... hopefully will help with longevity if i'm going to thrash either Vcore or SoC (keeping components like caps cooler)thomasg - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
In my opinion, all those boards are just silly.All they bring over the 2 years old X370 platform is PCIe 4.0 support, a bit more USB 3 Gen2 as well as often a second m.2 slot.
On the other hand, the southbridge fan is a ridiculous idea, especially consindering all the silly enormous heatsinks they mount to everything BUT the chipset.
And for that, they go for a premium of about 60% over X370 when it was fresh.
I paid 170 dollars for my PRIME X370-Pro day 1 (over 2 years ago), now the successor is 270 dollars.
The WS is the only board looking buyable, but then again, it also is actively cooled and doesn't even bring NBase-T.
I could forgive that, wouldn't they charge well above 300 dollars for it (while the other boards are close to MSRP in germany, the WS is already far below its MSPR).
Nope, thanks, I'm skipping X570.
Death666Angel - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
"I paid 170 dollars for my PRIME X370-Pro day 1 (over 2 years ago), now the successor is 270 dollars."Take that up with ASUS. I can get the X570 Phantom 4 from AsRock with (4x2) power stages (which means easier 3950X oc vs your x370 Pro) for 170€.
And for me, I'm starting to think that having 3 whole x4 slots (2 M.2, one x16) of 4.0 speeds is a nice addition versus the one 3.0 x4 M.2 and one 3.0 x2 or 2.0 x4 slot with another 2.0 x4 slot all the 4xx and 3xx mainboards offer. If I'm spending ~500€ anyway (32GB and 8 core), I might as well just spend another 170 on the mainboard vs 100 on a B450 (I need mATX, so only the MSI Mortar and AsRock Pro4 suite my needs).
And if you need Thunderbolt or over GbE speeds, these boards are the only way to go, frankly, since the 2.0 chipset lanes of the older chipsets are just terrible for this.
This doesn't satisfy your niche? Great, move along. That's the incredible thing about AMD supporting AM4 for this long. But no need to shit over a product that is pretty great overall, just because you don't need it's features.
thomasg - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
Indeed, it doesn't satisfy my niche, I'm just complaining about the new downsides of the new X570 platform, and specifically the available implementations.I'm not telling anyone not to get one, anyone who wants to take advantage of the extras is of course free to adopt the new boards.
I think I should be able to freely "shit over a product" as I wish without you having to take personal offense.
fearby - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Being in a hot climate I'd love to know what one has the best chipset cooling.gavbon - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
We are doing X570 chipset thermal analysis in our motherboard testing ;)