Let's talk about test conditions first. For this testing we've built a dedicated system inside the Corsair iCUE 7000X case. Powering it we have the HX1000 power supply and for cooling the Corsair iCUE H170i Elite Capellix. These are great news to share: there are no bad X670/X670E motherboards. Surely prices might be a bit hard to swallow, but there are no duds, and that's a rare thing when reviewing an entire motherboard series. We hope you found this useful and expect a similar piece covering B650 motherboards. Shopping Shortcuts:

You also get USB4 support, 10 USB ports on the I/O panel, high quality external audio, two M.2 ports, 2.5 Gbit LAN and WiFi 6E, so it's a super well equipped ITX motherboard, but of course it's not exactly cheap. The best high-end X670E motherboard is simply the MSI MEG X670E ACE. The stupid expensive Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme and MSI MEG X670E Godlike are excellent motherboards, but we can't justify the asking prices, especially in the case of the Godlike. For some reason Gigabyte spent their PCIe 5.0 budget on the M.2 drives, limiting the PCIe slot support to a single x16 slot. So while we guess four PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots is nice, we'd rather have the flexibility of having more PCIe slots. Asus is the only brand to offer a Mini-ITX X670E board, and they're also the only brand to also offer a MicroATX X670E board. So that means we have one Mini-ITX, one MicroATX and 20 ATX boards on hand. Well, I actually have this MB running a Ryzen 9-7900, Gskill 32gb memory at 6K mhz, Samsung 980 Pro and a Samsung 970 EVO. Graphics card is a Gigabyte 3080 with a 1200 watt Power Supply. I have some issues with the board.

Delivering the best features of the X670E platform at an affordable price.

A few things to note. Any temperature below 80c is to be considered very cool, VRM temps only start to become a concern when they exceed 90c, and even then there's still 10-20c worth of headroom before most boards will thermal throttle. Below 80c is very safe and will never present an issue, so all X670 boards are well within safe limits. The heatsinks are good for an 'entry level' X670 board. Running a 7950X under a sustained all core load, they were merely warm to the touch. Still, if you were to use PCIe 5.0 devices this configuration would make the most sense, as both delivers would receive x8 PCIe 5.0 bandwidth which is 32 GB/s. In comparison the Asus ROG Strix X670E-F Gaming connects its secondary PCIe x16 slot chipset, which is a lot cheaper to wire in, but does limit you to PCIe 4.0 x4 bandwidth (8 GB/s).

But if one wants to be able to hit the ground running with Gen5 M.2 SSDs, without having to wait for improved M.2 cooler solutions and/or without having to rethink the entire rig cooling in use, then there are as mentioned already some motherboards to consider. Essentially both boards have the same amount of PCIe bandwidth, the Carbon can just better spread that bandwidth across multiple slots while almost 90% of the PCIe bandwidth of the F Gaming is eaten up by the primary PCIe 5.0 x16 slot. The board is well made and gets the job done without any of the bells and whistles of the more expensive options out there. There are a few minor issues, hence not giving five stars.It's proof you don't have to spend loads of money on an expensive motherboard. Saving a couple of hundred dollars and putting it towards a faster CPU or better graphics card will deliver actual performance gains. Unless you need things like USB 4, 10G LAN or multiple PCIe 5.0 SSD support, you don't really lose all that much compared to more expensive boards.

Clearly there are people using this specific mobo without issues so it's highly unlikely that there is a fundamental design issue with this mobo as all motherboard makers work from AMDs design guide. More than likely over the next few months the issues will be resolved but there is always challenges for early adopters.

with "speed" also comes latency to deal with. remember the x16 pcie slot and fastest m.2 slots get their lanes direct from the cpu. GPU only covers 1 m.2 slot, but the other 3 are still accessible without removing the gpu, even with a 7900xtx red devil installed. Over the past few months we've been gathering as many AMD X670 motherboards as we could to test their VRM performance and to see if they can all handle the Ryzen 9 7950X without any kind of thermal throttling, something we ran into with a number of X570 motherboards a few years ago. In the same price range, the Asus ROG Strix X670E-I Gaming WiFi wins the award for the best X670E Mini-ITX motherboard by default, as it's the only one as does the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Gene for the best and only Micro-ATX motherboard. Due to the board layout, one of the PCIe4 M.2 connectors will covered by the GPU, this makes a replacement painful and not great considering the heat produced by a modern NVME SSD/GPU

And well, the good news is you don't have to worry about VRM thermals with X670 boards, not even a little. In the past, we've seen boards that should perform well fail miserably in this testing, but that's not the case here...the closer to the cpu, the less latency in getting data to and from the cpu. that's why ram slots are as close as possible to minimize how far the data has to go thus lowering latency as much as possible. It's an extreme motherboard as well, the 16 teamed 110A powerstage vcore VRM is no joke, there's two PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, USB4 support, loads of USB ports, onboard buttons, debug LED codes, 2.5 Gbit LAN and WiFi 6, it's an impressive but also ultra expensive mATX motherboard. What it does do is deliver the core X670E feature set with no fuss. You get PCIe 5.0 graphics card and SSD support, Wi-Fi 6E, a capable VRM and presumably you'll be able to drop a future Ryzen 8000 or 9000 CPU in with just a BIOS update. sailorjeff said:Well, I actually have this MB running a Ryzen 9-7900, Gskill 32gb memory at 6K mhz, Samsung 980 Pro and a Samsung 970 EVO. Graphics card is a Gigabyte 3080 with a 1200 watt Power Supply. I have some issues with the board.