Asus Hero Crosshair X570 VIII vs. MSI Meg B550 Unify for 5950X

[kamikazi]

I'm currently running a 5950X in my Asus Crosshair Hero VIII X570 board with 64 GB 3600. I got a great deal here on a combo with a 5950X and 64 GB 3600 on an MSI Meg B550 Unify. My original 5950X has a couple of bad cores for whatever reason and will not boost all core above 4.0 GHz (less I think actually, it was a little lower than my 3900X) without some very specific PBO settings. Basically, I have to either go for PBO performance or settle for crappy performance. There is no middle ground and I've tested it in another X570 board with the same results. I also have a 3900X on an Asus Tuf X570 board with 32 GB of RAM that I use for my server with an air cooler on it.

Anyway, I'm going to be switching parts around and building my daughter a computer. My plan is to use the 3900x from the server for my daughter's computer, and move my bum 5950X to the server with Tuf X570 board and air cooler. Most likely, I'll set it for stock as I think that the newer architecture plus 4 cores will still provide more performance than the 3900X. I'll also take the 32 GB of RAM from the server for use in my daughter's computer and put 64 GB of RAM in the server. The only thing that's up in the air is whether or not I want to keep the Asus Hero mobo on my computer and give my daughter the MSI Meg B550 or vice versa. I have a 3090 in my computer and yy daughter is getting an AMD RX460 from the parts bin as her computer is mainly for non gaming stuff.

I'm thinking I actually want the MSI Meg B550 in my computer for 2 reasons:

1. I'm strongly considering moving to MSI for my next future build and would like to check out the BIOS and see how everything works.

2. The MSI has 4 NVME slots where the Asus Hero only has 2. I remember when I bought it thinking it was ridiculous to only have 2 when pretty much every other competing X570 board had at least 3. I want to move my computer to completely NVME drives and get rid of all SATA stuff. Now, I can do that on the Asus Hero by using NVME adapters for PCI-Express slots. I actually have one already with a Gen 3.0 x4 drive in it, but I haven't tested to see if the speeds are up to snuff with a standard NVME slot. Either board will hold 4 NVME drives, but the MSI will do it without adapters. From my research looking through the manuals for each, as soon as you go up to 3 NVME drives, you are limited to PCE-Express Gen 4.0 x 8 on the graphics card instead of x16 with both boards. I don't really see that as an issue with a 3090. The one difference is that on the Asus Hero, you could use four Gen 4.0 x 4 drives where on the MSI, you can have three Gen 4.0 x 4 drives and one Gen 3.0 x 4 drive. Then, on the MSI, you would still have use of the PCI-E express slots at Gen 3.0 x1 (I have no idea what kind of hardware you would ever connect to those slots), but you lose two USB 3.0 slots (no big deal for me). I'm not sure I would notice a speed drop on the 4th NVME drive at Gen 3.0 speeds that would most likely just be holding file storage.

Other thoughts: I'm not concerned about any differences in power delivery or chipset cooling between the two boards. I'm sure the MSI Meg B550 power stages are good to go.

So, am I missing anything big here? Anyone have any reasons or use cases where the Crosshair Hero VIII is superior to the MSI Meg B550 Unify for gaming and/or video editing with a water cooled 5950X and water cooled 3090?

 

[Dopamin3]

The B550 Unify (and Unify X) are some of the best AM4 boards available, having 14 + 2 90A smart power stages. It actually beats the Crosshair VIII which has 14 + 2 60A smart power stages. Both are quality boards and have a POST code. Both boards can easily handle a water cooled 5950X, but having the most overkill VRM is nice and theoretically the board should live a longer life. You're already aware of the one biggest "shortcomings", which is when populating multiple NVME you run into:

I fully support your decision to use the Unify for yourself and pass along the Crosshair to your daughter. The last thing I'll mention since I see you're a fellow AM4 server enjoyer... MSI is the only AM4 board partner that doesn't work with unbuffered ECC memory. You can use unbuffered ECC with nearly all boards from Asus, Gigabyte, and Asrock (with all non iGPU AM4 Ryzen CPUs or "Pro" APUs)

 

[kamikazi]

The B550 Unify (and Unify X) are some of the best AM4 boards available, having 14 + 2 90A smart power stages. It actually beats the Crosshair VIII which has 14 + 2 60A smart power stages. Both are quality boards and have a POST code. Both boards can easily handle a water cooled 5950X, but having the most overkill VRM is nice and theoretically the board should live a longer life. You're already aware of the one biggest "shortcomings", which is when populating multiple NVME you run into:

View attachment 650441View attachment 650442

I fully support your decision to use the Unify for yourself and pass along the Crosshair to your daughter. The last thing I'll mention since I see you're a fellow AM4 server enjoyer... MSI is the only AM4 board partner that doesn't work with unbuffered ECC memory. You can use unbuffered ECC with nearly all boards from Asus, Gigabyte, and Asrock (with all non iGPU AM4 Ryzen CPUs or "Pro" APUs)

Thanks, I went for it this afternoon and swapped it in. I updated the BIOS (it was on some version from 2021). At stock settings, CB20 scored just below 9800 multicore. I turned on PBO, set it to motherboard limits and set all cores to -10 in the core optimizer.

Not too shabby for just a couple of changes in BIOS.

It really hammered the power and wattage though. CPU hit 90C while running, too. I think I may need to detune PBO a little.

CB R23 results

 

[kamikazi]

So, it's a tale of 3 motherboards. I've played around with the "bum" 5950x from my main system. I moved it into the Asus Tuf X570 from the Asus Crosshair VIII Hero X570 and it seems to run like a normal 5950x. In fact, it may have been doing this all along and my old thread on this Did I degrade my 5950x? may have been kind of a waste of time. On an air cooler, the old Thermalright Silver Arrow with an AM4 mounting bracket, it scores around 9600 in CB20 and 23600 in CB23, not bad for an air cooler. It was scoring around that on custom watercooling when I started the old thread about degrading my 5950x. I'm thinking now in retrospect that I was running PBO and it got turned off. At the time, I thought I was getting awesome CB20 scores at stock and then got low scores all of the sudden. Based on recent research, somewhere between 9500 and 10000 seems to be normal with stock settings. Anyway, back to today...I did change out the two stock 140mm fans for two 120mm Noctua NFA25x15 fans on the Silver Arrow, still on the turbo fan setting in BIOS. Running Blue Iris for my camera system did make it run a little hot, it stayed in the low to mid 70s (CPU (Tctl/Tdie). What is strange though is that the CPU actually runs cooler when running all cores in Cinebench. I noticed this in the thread I referenced earlier. Also, with the same RAM and settings from the Crosshair system that was running 3600 with just XMP settings, I can't get the Tuf board to boot. I did get it to boot at 3333 settings, but I don't think it's completely stable. So, I left all the XMP settings the same, but rolled it back to 3200 with Infinity fabric at 1600 and all is well. Funny how different the two boards are in that respect.

I did want to get temps down a bit for longevity. The 3900x that was in there was running Blue Iris at stock settings in the low to mid 60s for temps. So, I went into the PBO settings and turned it on. I set TDC to 95, EDC to 140, and PPT to 105 (to match the 3900x basically). I also did a -10 offset across all cores. Now, temps in Blue Iris are essentially the same as they were for the 3900x at stock settings, low to mid 60s, but now with a lot more cores. I ran CB23 and got a score around 21,500 and again, I noticed a drop in CPU temps into the 50s while running this, the CPU fans also slowed down to 1100 rpm from 1500 rpm. It's just odd that it runs cooler on all core boost. I guess because core speeds are so much lower? 23,600 is my normal score for a stock 5950x with TDC of 142. So, I'm now getting 22,000 with TDC of 105. So, roughly 20% more efficient at a lower TDC. The air cooling difference shows up when running CB23 for 30 minutes, the final score is 21,200. All in all, I think this is a great swap in to the server where I don't need super performance, just consistent, good performance. On thing that is baffling me though is that it runs 60 degrees at idle with the CPU eating just under 50 watts at the Windows Desktop with CPU fans at 1500 rpm, but runs as low as 50C while cranking CB23 with fans at 1100 rpm. I just don't get it, CPU is drawing 105 watts, boosting all cores to around 3325-3350, dropping temps to 50C with the fan rpms dropping to 1100, but then pulling 50 watts at idle with cores bouncing around with temps in the low 60s and fan rpms at 1500, but whatever.

Now, the MSI Unify Board with the new to me 5950x, seems to run a little hotter, even with everything set to stock. It idles around 38 to 41 degrees, where the old setup idled around 34 with PBO enabled. The MSI setup also seems to heat up quicker and higher when pushing it. I may re-paste this weekend. Perhaps I didn't get a great mount. Performance is fine though.

 

[applegrcoug]

I too have a couple of 5950xs. I think one is better, but it seems when I actually put the screws to them they are about the same.

Both are under water with PBO enabled and a custom set core offset. With some time (mainly at night when you sleep) running core cycler you can get each core dialed in to the best negative offset.