ASRock X670E PG Lightning - Nice AMD Zen 4 Motherboard For $250 USD

[mifritscher]

100...400s for the first POST before the monitor goes on? WTF?! What they are doing?! Even if it this is really needed: Only the first portion of the RAM could be initialized before turning on the monitor, and todays CPUs have plenty of Lx cache to use this as RAM - I know that at least some CPUs support this mode.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Where can this be found for $250? A quick browse on Amazon had it at $290, which is only $10 less than the Steel Legend. Not that I really know what the difference between the two is (or really care, because the slot layout is appalling and no 10GbE is a no-no for me now). The PCI(-E) layout gets worse with each generation. In Japan, cheapest I've found it was 48,000JPY.

[otoomet]

Any word about its power consumption? Intel gets a lot of flak due to the power-hungry cpu-s, but power at wall is also quite an important measure. And these E-grade enthusiast chipsets may be quite power hungry.

[billyswong]

Since when a 250USD motherboard for mainstream CPUs can be categorized "cost-minded"? Ouch this crazy world. Is PCIe5 really this costly?? Or is it because of the increased TDP of AM5?

[iruoy]

I wouldn't be so optimistic about sensor support. My Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master board with an ITE SuperIO is still not fully supported and requires acpi_enforce_resources=lax (from the top of my head, might be named a little different) as kernel command line parameter. I've given up on ever seeing proper support.
So I'll probably go ASUS next, if I can verify the board is supported in advance. But ASUS is way more expensive for AM5 boards currently.
By the way, I think the B650E chipset is a better choice (that double chipset thing for X670 is just stranfe and seems like it's wasting power for very little gain), bit the cheapest option is around 360 Eur for an ASUS board and that seems way too expensive to me ...

I'm in the same boat. I've got the same motherboard and will also buy ASUS going forward since they seem to care the most about linux compatibility.

[L_A_G]

Worth pointing out that here in Europe everything related to Zen4 and AM5 has gone trough major price hikes probably due to the weak Euro (thanks Putler, Merkel and all the other idiots who made us energy-dependent on Russia).

We used to see a "$1 = 1€" kind of conversion, but now it's more like "$1 = 0.8€" so for example the $400 Ryzen 7 7700X retails at around 500€. This "$250" motherboard retails at around 380€ here in Finland and the "$200" Asus Prime B650 cost me 260€. Works real nice as long as you don't need to go into the BIOS because that just results in a black screen. Their support is as worthless as ever.

Also, it was kind of annoying trying to find a board with an S/PIDF-port as I like to use a cheap home theater soundbar setup for audio at my computer desk. Thou its something that's become a rarity years ago as I got to experience when I needed a temporary replacement for my X370 board last summer and purchased a B450 board thinking it'd have that the same way my failing X370 board had. Then there's also the fact that the other full width PCIe is so close to the top one that it's basically blocked by the absolute brick that is my RTX 3090 FE.

[Goof]

wow, $250 is double the most I've ever paid for a motherboard! (outside of multi cpu server class stuff)

[cj.wijtmans]

I will never pay more than roughly 120.