The ASUS PRIME x570 PRO

D1D01 · March 1, 2022

A Good Board but the M.2_2 Socket Suffers 10C Penalty and the Stylish Heatsink is Ineffectual

I wanted to upgrade from my existing MSI B450 to an X570 for my AMD 2700x Music and Video production System. Having researched the market, this board was the best option for my budget, around (AU) $300.00.

It had 12+2 DrMOS power stages, was PCIe 4 ready, and importantly compatible from the Ryzen 5000 back to the 2000 Series AMD Chips.

It had good rear-panel USB options: 4 USB 3.1 Gen 1, and 3 type-A plus 1 type-C 3.1 Gen2. The best arrangement I could find at the time at this price.

Be aware there is no USB 2.0 available on the rear-panel at all, there are however 2 USB 2.0 headers on the board to connect to Case I/O.

The Board has 2 x M.2 Slots, and three full-size PCIe Slots as expected. As usual, (and baffling why?) the lowest PCIe slot on the X570 oft-encountered topography is mostly usless as there is no clearance for any card's components due to the proximity of the Comms, USB, Jumpers, etc headers. Does anyone have a clue as to the logic here? Please.

I was not concerned at the lack of on-board WiFi, bluetooth or it only having 1GB LAN.

I was planning on populating both M.2 Slots and installing another NVMe M.2 in the second PCIe Slot by way of an adapter card. This would oblige me to run my Graphics Card in x8 mode, but I was convinced from my research that the performance hit to my RTX 2060 would be negligable.

I also wanted an ASUS board, particularly as I could stand the MSI BIOS no longer!

The Motherboard and it's sensible yet hugely featured BIOS are very good. For me, past experience trying to OC the 2700x was a waste of time - you may disagree, but I don't like the idea of locking it's speed and using Ryzen Master was a headfuck experience that yielded nothing worthwhile. This Chip runs pretty much at it's best out of the box.

The PRIME x570 overclocks RAM very capabily though; my Crucial Ballistix 3200 CL16 sticks run perfectly at 3200, 14-16-16-36 (1T) at 1.425V. Passing overnight MemTest cleanly. This degree of OC is fine for me, I require the stability.

The issue I dicovered with the thermals on the second M.2 socket is not a deal-breaker but worth noting. It is a fact that the X570 Chipset from AMD runs relatively Hot! Most 570 boards have a fan over the chipset and the fan cowling on the PRIME opens out directly onto the M.2_2 socket location. It was possibly thought this airflow design on paper would also benefit the M.2 drive; it doesn't. It actually blows hot air onto it. So at idle, the M.2_2 socket Drive is a steady 10 degrees C warmer, (52C) than the Drive in the M.2_1 socket position and reaches in my case, up to 78-80C under load, (ambient 25c). I have swapped the drives to verify it is the socket. 78-80C is well within operational limits, but the drive will start to throttle speed at about 80. I installed the supplied heat -plate with thermal pad and it reduced the temp by only 1 degree.

A proper third-party M.2 heatsink, (Archgon - HS-1110-S) hasn't helped much either, (Still 50C at idle). One rather convoluted solution could be to enploy something like a YUPVM NGFF M.2 to PCI-E 4X Riser and a EZDIY-FAB M.2 NVME SSD to PCI Express Gen3/4 Adapter. This combination would lift the M.2 Drive up away from the Board and should solve the heat issue without interfering with performance of the Drive. The Adapter comes with a small heatsink.

But since I could use some extra cooling for my GPU as well, I am going to do a DIY Case-Fan Mod with a Noctua NF-A14 industrial PPC-2000 140mm. Hopefully this sheer firepower will benefit all concerned, including the Chipset. I will keep you informed.

So, not a critical flaw, but disappointing that ASUS did not address this issue with a more robust thermal solution. However the price-point is modest, I suppose.

Cheers!