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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abufrejoval - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
PCI4 and 5, or for that matter IF will trigger rethinking motherboard layouts and form factors."The [Enthusiast] motherboard" dates back to 1981 or the dawn of the IBM Personal Computer, and physics are catching up everywhere, even on the motherboard.
Distance has a huge impact on speed, latency and power, so 'flat' and 'square' are both the first obstacles and the first who need to compromise. In the future every milimeter of distance between the die carrier and your point of interest will need to be paid for, in energy/time or extra switching silicon.
Linear extrapolations of the past have little use, when the barriers are exponential.
TheUnhandledException - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Even if you keep the board a square moving the CPU and chipset to the center of the board and having PCIe slots on either side would cut the trace to the furthest slots in half.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Hopefully at the same time we can ditch 12V as the rail to rule them all, so that we can bring the amperages in current systems back down to sane levels.ChubChub - Friday, July 12, 2019 - link
Would be cool to see the CPU on one side of the board, and the cards on the other; would shrink those distances, but would require a new form factor, which would kindof suck (but I can picture what the dual-sided boards would look like, and I think it's a pretty neat idea having two independent sides for cooling (also, in a tower setup, a CPU sitting vertically on the board, which would be nice).Targon - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
This is why if Gen-Z gets adopted, we could have PCI Express hanging off the Gen-Z bus as a way to deal with these issues.sing_electric - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
I was thinking that the mobo costs made price comparisons more difficult. Then I remembered that AMD is still throwing in a pretty good stock cooler, while Intel makes you BYO. For MOST users, that means that your total build cost will be lower with AMD.If you're doing something exotic - say, with liquid cooling or heavy overclocking that requires a certain thermal solution - then sure, you lose those savings, but if you're spending $300 to keep your machine cool, is the price difference of the motherboard really going to sway you one way or another?
Oliseo - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
You're actually comparing the bundled CPU cooler to a $300 custom loop Intel Cooler?You're expecting people to take you seriously as well?
Targon - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
Consider that for those who buy the i9-9900k, you can't get away with a 95W cooler, even if the rated TDP is 95W. So, you do need to buy at least a $30 cooler for air cooling on the 9900k, while AMD does provide a cooler to handle the typical performance of its processors. Even then, $330 for the Ryzen 7 3700X or 3800X for 8 cores/16 threads, vs. the $489 for the 9900k+$30 or $40 will still be more expensive for an 8 core/16 thread chip.What many don't realize is that if you go with AMD and get a B450 or X470 chipset motherboard(that has an updated BIOS or with BIOS flashback), you get the motherboard price you want, and the cost of ownership will still be lower. Since Intel doesn't offer PCI Express 4.0, going with PCI Express 3.0 on the AMD side won't be a big deal from the comparison point of view. Overclocking potential has not been compared between the enthusiast class X470 and X570 based motherboards from what I have seen as well, but it could make a difference for many people.
Flunk - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
I like how almost all of these boards have 2 or more M.2 slots. I had to be very careful when I bought my Z170 board to find one with 3 M.2 slots.But now there are boards with 3 slots so maybe I'll have to snag that Aorus Ultra.
drexnx - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
it's amazing how fast number of M.2 slots has become the primary thing I look for in a mobo anymore too