ASUS ProArt X870E-CREATOR WiFi AMD AM5 X870E ATX Motherboard PCIe® 5.0 x16 Slots with Full Support for Next-gen GPUs, 16+2+2 Power Stages, DDR5, Dual USB4®, 10 Gb & 2.5 Gb LAN, WiFi 7, Four M.2 Slots

Offers a ton of flexibility
Price paid: 405$Version: Asus x670e proart creatorWhere do I start? I wanted to maximize my use case for this board so I had many expectations to fill.My use case—————I currently plan on using this board for linux gaming, steam in home game streaming, full stack development, experimenting with homelabbing, development vms (macos / windows / linux), etc.Future use cases include: a secondary truenas server running along side desktop use, a full blown server, a handbrake server, 3D game development, etc. etc. etc.Since I am going to be d!icking around a lot, I didn’t want a motherboard that would limit my creativity (pun not intended)Motherboard goals:- VFIO for GPU passthrough to VMs – (development, steam streaming)- Server instances- Future homelab server- Longevity: Plan on using this thing for 10 years- Ego fullfillmentThe Market————–From all the research I could gather, my options were: Asus Proart Creator b650, this board, Asrock x670e taichi, MSI Carbon. Focusing on the x670e boards, they all have more or less the same features. Each brand used a small portion of the chipset bandwidth for something else.- Taichi (~490$): 8 sata ports, 8 usb, 2 thunderbolt, 1 nic (2.5), 2 pcie slots (x16/x0 or x8/x8), optical out, q-code led matrix- Carbon (~440$): 6 sata ports, 8 usb, NO thunderbolt, 1 nic (2.5), 3 pcie slots (x16/x0/x4 or x8/x8/x4), optical out, q-code led matrix- Proart (~405$): 4 sata ports, 8 usb, 2 thunderbolt, 2 nic (2.5/10), 3 pcie slots (x16/x0/x2* or x8/x8/x2*), NO optical out, NO q-code led matrixOf course, there are more nuances, but these were the feature differences that stuck out to me the most. If you want the cheapest VFIO board, get the b650 pro-art. If you want something balls to the walls, the MSI ACE could be a consideration for you. Personally, I did not see a future of emotional fulfillment in either of these boards.VFIO——-IOMMU groupings can be found on the level1tech forums. Passthrough seems to work for some users. However, the groupings on any board aren’t the most atomic. It is the desire of the community for AMD to release an AGESA update that allows for better IOMMU groupings via a bios option. My understanding is this has occurred on last gen (x570) boards. Please take this into account if you are going to do hardcore VFIO stuff. It is not guaranteed that Asus will even support the newer AGESA options, if it even comes out.Anyways, I originally bought this motherboard in order to allow for two GPUs to be used at the same time. One GPU would be for my linux host, while the other would be given to a windows vm for gaming, card work, development, etc. But I’ll be honest, I haven’t gotten around to setting this feature up. I mainly wanted a windows vm to allow steam game streaming to occur at the same time as I do development work. But, I found a different solution.I run steam in gamescope on a separate display (TV). This containerizes games so my usage of the desktop doesn’t interfere with someone else streaming a game (if the person streaming uses a controller, not kbm).My experience with this board———————————–So far, everything has mostly run great. I love the quality of the board and aesthetics. The antenna is under-rated too! It looks cool magnetically attached off the back of my hyte y60 case. I haven’t had any issues with drivers on linux (audio, bluetooth, thunderbolt, 2.5gb nic worked great). Also didn’t have any ram issues. Running 6400mhz 2x32gb Teamgroup t-create ram.Issues I ran into:- I haven’t actually tested the 10gb nic. Some people claim to have issues with it.- Couldn’t find the eco mode for my 7900x in the bios. Don’t know if I’m an idiot, or it doesn’t exist.- No q-code is a joke on this board. I have issues where my gpu will hang the pc on boot. I have no idea why this is happening. My last asus board from 2013 gave a b6 code or something. Why would a mission critical feature like this be missing on a board like this?- Bios update was looping when I flashed using bios flashback. Kept getting hung updating the thunderbolt firmware. Fixed when I finally unplugged the thunderbolt plug when it did its millionth reboot.- having 2 more sata ports would have been nice, but the bandwidth is already maxed out.- Recent Asus controversy was not confidence inspiring.Conclusion————–Everything has been running rock-solid on Manjaro 22.1.3. Wayland is working fine with my 5700xt. Did notice my monitor struggles to sleep/dim. Also, sleep causes a shutdown sometimes when I have certain apps opening. But yeah, considering the software and hardware is cutting edge, I laid a brick with how smooth everything has been running.Ultimately it has been hard to not recommend this board. Literally everything works out of the box. Didn’t really have any teething issue either. Absolutely ecstatic and hope that this board last 10+ years like my current, but old, Maximus vi gene. For the central core of my PC, I have great piece of mind that future upgrade-ability will not limit me. Are there other boards out there? Sure. But this seems to be the best bang for the buck on the market.

Buyers beware: Malicious Overvoltage and Overheating in 2024! (and many other problems)
This was bought July 2023. I rewrote my review after the new findings since it is so bad and dangerous.The board applies a massive overvoltage of 0.15V BY DEFAULT to CPU VCore. I found it out after months of troubleshooting on why my CPU is throttling on a 240 AIO even without any overclocking. You have to disable “Core Performance Boost”, then you will see a temp drop of 20C. YES, TWENTY DEGREES CELSIUS. However, if you disable this option PBO also is disabled. It doesn’t tell you that so you have to waste countless hours to find out. What if you want to use PBO? You need to put a negative offset on VCore to compensate.You have no control over VSoc. You can set a value but there is no effect. You can’t even set it to a lower value. What a cheap solution to the scandal.You should never try AI Overclock, not even for once out of curiosity. It disregards all safety limits and makes your CPU run at 115C. Performance uplift is less than 5%. This feature is neither powered by AI nor does ASUS have any sense of responsibility providing this feature. It basically just degrades your CPU on YOUR behalf.The BIOS is unreliable. You can easily get into an unrecoverable state where the BIOS thinks it is good but it just keeps crashing immediately after post. This board made the matter worse to not include any button to clear CMOS, reset, or safe boot. Nor does it have Q-code display. NO OTHER BRAND has the audacity to not include any of these on a $400 motherboard. Conversely, there is a extremely cheap button to flash BIOS as if you will use that often.Even the Safety mode is unreliable. I have had multiple occasions where it said it is posted into safety mode and it is still crashing. Some values get reverted while some don’t. Good luck tracking all your changes. Even if you use a profile there are still settings that are omitted.EDIT 3/11/2024: There are definitely some bugs with the flash BIOS storage. There are many times where one configuration turns out fine and passes extended stability test but then nothing would POST after a reboot. No profile restores, no safe boot, nothing. You would have to clear CMOS.EDIT 5/4/2024: BIOS upgrade flash removed all my user profiles and made the previously exported ones partially unreadable. I lost the PBO CO per core settings which took me days to obtain. There’re also some random setting getting turned on and off which I don’t recognize. Nothing was improved.The BIOS menu is badly organized and appears incomplete. There are two sets of overclocking menus. One works and one does not. Same setting on different menu causes different effect. Some settings disable some other. There is minimal help information. Good luck finding it yourself.Memory overclock causes a extremely long boot (~70s). There are two settings to increase the boot time but if either is enabled the board enters an irrecoverable state. You have to clear CMOS.Board uses cheap materials. At similar price, MSI offers about 50% thicker PCB and much better hardware. Black and gold paint does not automatically make things higher quality. Biggest offender for ASUS is the use of low-melting ABS plastic on PC components that could potentially overheat. BTW, the fumes of ABS is poisonous.Specification sheet on the PCIe/M.2 slots is deceiving. It says M2.3 shares bandwidth with PCIex4 slot. You’d assume you just need to use only one to get the full x4 bandwidth. It is not. Any RAID 0 configuration is cut to half bandwidth as long as it includes M2.3 regardless usage of the x4 PCIe slot. Pciex4 slot works at x2 at maximum. You will never get what you are promised on the spec sheet.Edit 10/2/2024: I just found out this board does not have a X670E chipset but rather just a X670 even though the produce name clearly says “X670E”. Now this just looks like a blatant fraud.ASUS bloatware is always a big problem. Some randomly gives you error popups while some changes your settings. You never know what else it will do. There are tens of them and it is extremely difficult to get rid of. They infest your program folder, windows folder, services and task schedulers. Yes you can disable auto install in BIOS but because things randomly reset then they get right back.Previously I gave the board a 2 star because at least it works. Now that I found it is trying to degrade my CPU by default I cannot tolerate it anymore. Wish I could return it for refund but it is too late. It is not even used for my original intended purpose.

Good all round board with little or no LED crap. The 10G Ethernet is a huge advantage. AURA support for peripherals and memory is all there. Easy to install and get running for experienced builder. The CPU is fast, the I/O is faster, no twiddling of thumbs, medium size files are just there! I initially thought something was wrong, and they were not actually transferring (move/copy/paste), but they went perfectly with MS x-fer or Teracopy. Not as starkly bare-bones as the ASUS TUF boards.

I used this board to build a machine with AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU, G.Skill Flare X5 64 Gb of 6000 MHz RAM, and KC3000 2Tb SSD to start with. Everything worked out of the box, including CPU and RAM AI overclocking. With a 360 mm AIO, the CPU can boost the cores to 5.85 GHz but I saw all cores compiling a kernel module running at 5.4 GHz. With Linux 22.04, all Ethernet and WiFi modules are recognized and working out of the box.I chose this to run a two GPU setup; however, that is the only disadvantage of these PCIe Gen 5 board:The two PCIe Gen 5.0 slots run at 8x in Gen 5 OR also 8x in Gen 4 mode. Despite the fact that the 8x Gen 5 = 16x Gen4 in terms of bandwidth, the GPUs do not get 16x Gen 4 because the bifurcation only splits 16x into two 8x in terms of available physical lines. It does not turn 8x Gen 5 into 16x Gen 4 PCIe slot. Fortunately, for most GPUs, 16x or 8x Gen 4 does not make much difference (1% or so slower for 8x).