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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Tunnah - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
I really love how advanced motherboards are nowadays. I can pick up the most "basic" model and it'll cover everything I need, and even include stuff I won't. Gone are the days frantically trying to find a motherboard that ticks all the boxes for even the most basic of needs.Plus having such a competent board as my soon-to-be secondary system means I can leave all my drives in that and put it in a nice quiet place. I'm fairly certain the 8 HDDs in this one are what caused my tinnitus :/
Jansen - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
The ASUS Pro WS X570-Ace has officially validated ECC support. This is a really big deal, as Ryzen has usually only had unofficial ECC support. It opens up a whole other revenue steam for AMD that Intel has deliberately cut off in order to drive Xeon sales.Micron is ramping up its 16GB 3200MHz DDR4 ECC modules MTA18ADF2G72AZ-3G2 specifically for this market.
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
I'd much sooner get a Ryzen platform for their value and unbuffered ECC support for an upgrade for my NAS box running FreeNAS, but it's well documented that FreeBSD still has teething issues with Ryzen chips, scheduling, and overall reliability... FreeBSD is what powers FreeNAS OS.So I'm kind of stuck with Intel workstations/server CPUs and ECC ram for a FreeBSD machine (assuming I don't want to do the legwork of trying to get it stable first, and even so, I may not always have the same stability that mature FreeBSD+Intel support...)
I'll very likely be moving to Ryzen for my main PC, though.
quorm - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
I agree with the general sentiment. Core i3 is another option if you don't need a lot of cpu power.teldar - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
I used a ryzen 1600 for my bad. Rock solid after updating board bios.danjw - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
I built a file server on Ubuntu Server. You might try that.BillC - Saturday, October 31, 2020 - link
You might want to check out Open Media Vault which uses Debian Linux for the OS, it can be installed as a NAS only installation or on top of the full Debian OS.spikebike - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Wow, pricey board. Sad that AMD handles ECC in such a half assed way. Intel's price premium for low end servers is approximately $0. Xeon E3's were priced very similarly or even cheaper to the similar desktop parts. In particular the cheapest hyperthreading E3 was often cheaper than the cheapest i3/i5/i7 with 4 cores/8 threads. Similar with the HEDT, the intel premium for a better socket/additional memory busses is much less than the low end Eypc/Threadripper.So you either have the luck of the draw trying to buy a reliable AMD with ECC (not just physically compatible, but actually corrects memory errors), or you pay a substantial price premium.
Aikouka - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
ASRock Rack has a Ryzen motherboard that officially supports ECC and also has IPMI support (X470D4U). They're also developing a Threadripper variant of their Epyc server board that has IPMI support, but it uses the X370 chipset.cascadehealthcare - Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - link
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