The AMD X570 Motherboard Overview: Over 35+ Motherboards Analyzed
by Gavin Bonshor on July 9, 2019 8:00 AM ESTMSI X570-A Pro
Moving along to the last of MSI's seven deep X570 product stack is the entry-level MSI X570-A Pro. For users not looking to spend the $200 + for gaming branded boards and looking for more office-based and professional use, the MSI X570-A Pro includes a decent core feature set which includes the same 8+2 power delivery as the MPG X570 Gaming Plus ($169), but with basic design. Also included is a Gigabit NIC, DDR4-4400 support, and one PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot.
On the MSI X570-A Pro is two full-length PCIe 4.0 which operate at x16, and x8/x4, and three PCIe 4.0 x1 slots. Also featured is one PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, but this slot doesn't come included with a heatsink; a total of six SATA ports make up the rest of the board's storage options. This model is very resemblant of the X570 Gaming Plus, but with a more professional look with its all-black theme, but without RGB or red accented heatsinks. On the X570 chipset heatsink is a cooling fan, and the X570-A Pro also has four memory slots with support for DDR4-4400 and up to a maximum of 128 GB. It also shares the same 8+2 power delivery as the X570 Gaming Edge WIFI and X570 Gaming Plus models, and also includes an 8-pin and 4-pin pair of 12 V ATX CPU power inputs.
MSI's X570-A Pro includes one USB 3.1 G2 Type-A, one USB 3.1 G2 Type-C, two USB 3.1 G1 Type-A, and two USB 2.0 ports on its rear panel. A clear CMOS switch is present, along with an HDMI video output, and a PS/2 combo port. The single Ethernet port is controlled by a Realtek RTL8111H Gigabit NIC, while the five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical output are powered by a premium Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec.
The MSI X570-A Pro as it stands is the cheapest model from its X570 product stack with an MSRP of $159. It's solid and uniformed all-black look is very simplistic, and users not looking for NVIDIA SLI support and more than two PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots will find this as an attractive model. This no-frills and inexpensive (compared to some others) makes this one of the cheaper entry points onto the X570 chipset for users looking to benefit from X570's features such as PCIe 4.0.
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isthisavailable - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
The industry needs to make up its mind when it comes to USB C. Laptops are launching with only USB C and meanwhile $700 motherboards only have 1 USB C port and 8+ "outdated" USB A'sThe_Assimilator - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
It's almost like there's a huge amount of peripherals with USB-A connectors that people who use PCs expect to continue to work when they upgrade! Isn't backwards compatibility a funny feature?Meanwhile, the only peripherals that laptops generally use are docks, hubs, and storage devices - all of which have USB-C versions out the wazoo.
naris - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Why are memory speeds and channels show & discussed when talking about chipsets when the memory controllers are in the CPUs? Memory controllers have not been in chipsets for many years now!halfflat - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
ECC support can be hard to verify for mere mortals; collating (or even better, verifiying) ECC capability on these motherboards would be an extremely useful addition to the article.ishkatar - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Does any of the boards support Raid 5? I only see 0, 1 and 10.Zibi - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
You don't want to use RAID 5 without proper RAID Controller with cache.That means dedicated card.
Actually from performance / security perspective RAID 10 is pretty OK.
The_Assimilator - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
AMD dropped RAID-5 support upon introduction of the AM4 socket (remember, chipset functionality like RAID is now a CPU function). I don't have an issue with that, since -5 is a very uncommon use-case in consumer workloads and if you want to do -5 right, you really want a hardware RAID card with a BBU.But -5 is pretty much dead anyway due to ever-increasing drive sizes - the rebuild time on anything over 1TB is horrendous, what you really want in such a scenario is RAID-6, and no consumer motherboard every has or will support that.
And please don't tell me you're using RAID-5 for data integrity, because invisible corruption is a thing that I have experienced personally. If you want *actual* data integrity, use Windows Storage Spaces or RAID-10, and as a last resort RAID-6.
Arbie - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
There must be something you left out of this roundup. Whatever it was, please go back and put it in, and next time get it right. Thanks.Korguz - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
huh ????Gastec - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
That $700 must be an error right, perhaps of judgement?