Mobo pairing for a 3900X?

SunnyD

2[H]4U
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Jul 6, 2004
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It's upgrade time, and I've been poking through the threads for suggestions on which motherboard to pair with a 3900X that I have on the way.

Personally I was looking at the Asrock X570 Taichi - it has a whole slew of features and whatnot but I'm not seeing many reviews on it in general. It has pretty much any and every feature I could want or care about, hence it being my benchmark pick.

Basically my desired spec sheet:
At least 2 m.2 slots
Intel Gigabit NIC
USB 3.x ports a plenty

Pretty much anything else is bells and whistles. I'm not locked into any specific price point or feature set otherwise. I've seen people recommending the Gigabyte Aorus and various Asus boards. Really, just looking for something stable, don't care much about overclocking.

Other than all of that, I'm cheap - so getting the best board I can for the least money is always a good thing.
 
The Taichi boards have generally been pretty good, but the X570 one won't take a PCIe NVMe drive that has a heatsink. The "thermal armor" is all one unit.

I have the Asus CH8 and I like it. A little pricey though.
 
Most of the x570 boards are pretty good. It comes down to the bios interface for me and I prefer the way Asus lays things out especially in ROG format.
 
The Taichi boards have generally been pretty good, but the X570 one won't take a PCIe NVMe drive that has a heatsink. The "thermal armor" is all one unit.

I have the Asus CH8 and I like it. A little pricey though.

My ASUS x570-E board was like that as well. I simply removed the heat sink on my M.2 and used the one already on the board. I'd assume you can do the same with the Taichi boards.
 
Second vote for the ASUS ROG X570-E, it has a crazy amount of features, ports, 2.5Gb ethernet and Intel 1Gb ethernet. Really solid board so far.
 
Since you mentioned you're cheap:

Cheapest from Asus that fits your bill is probably the X570 PRO. Cheapest from Gigabyte is the Aorus Pro.
 
I don't have the X570-E board in front of me, but if it's anything like my CH8, the M.2 "heatsink" with the thermal pad is a separate piece from the main chipset cover. It all screws together, but you don't have to use the M.2 heatsink if you didn't want to. It sounds like the Taichi doesn't have sectioned pieces of the heatsink. It's all or nothing.
 
I have the x570 Taichi in my latest build (got it from one of the guys here on H) and it's a great board. I'm running a Gen4 NVME drive that came with a heatsink and since the mobo has an integrated heatsink, I just removed the stock m.2 and plopped it in under the mobo cooler. Works perfectly fine. I'd wager that the huge integrated mobo heatsink (with an active fan) wicks heat away better than the dinky passive one that came with the m.2 drive.

As for features, it's like you said, everything and the kitchen sink. The main down side IMO is the price. It's definitely not the cheapest around but pretty good for what you get. The bios updates are fast and everything works.

My local microcenter has it for about 250 (or open box for about 230) so worth checking out if there is one near you.
 
I don't have the X570-E board in front of me, but if it's anything like my CH8, the M.2 "heatsink" with the thermal pad is a separate piece from the main chipset cover. It all screws together, but you don't have to use the M.2 heatsink if you didn't want to. It sounds like the Taichi doesn't have sectioned pieces of the heatsink. It's all or nothing.

I've got a Strix-E. The heatsink is quit solid and I had no qualms about using it vs a diff sink like EKs for example.
 
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Thanks all - a lot of choices to look at. Thankfully I'm not in any real hurry and will probably hold out to see if there's any decent black friday deals coming. Changing jobs next week so it's not like I have time to blow anyway.
 
Figured I'd drop in and say "parts ordered". My wife told me to "get the good stuff", so do not pass go, do not collect $200... just whip out the credit card.

Build is gonna look something like this:

  • AMD Ryzen 3900X
  • Asus X570 Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi
  • 2x16GB Corsair Vengence LPX
  • Sabarent 1TB Rocket m.2 NVMe
Going to be reusing my 1070Ti until the next actual performance boosting generation of video card comes out. It's all going into my Fractal Design R4. Just need to figure out now if I need a new PSU and whether the stock cooler will be good enough.
 
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