Product Showcase
The X370 motherboard will get you six SATA 6 Gb/s storage ports. Combined in here is a full M.2 PCI Express slot using x4 PCIe lanes directly from the CPU thus 32 GB/sec of performance. There is a second one as well, it seems to be using a x2 PCIe lanes link, meaning less bandwidth but still it would be plenty fast. We'll have a look at that in the tests. Towards the far right you can see a U2 connector as well. There are plenty of USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports available through internal motherboard connectors, some AMD Ryzen based, some chipset and some Asmedia ASM2142 powered. USB 3.1 Gen 2 would be the fastest 10 Gbps connectors.
Here we can see the four DIMM slots which offer support for dual-channel DDR4 memory up to an advertised 3200 MHz (OC). You can install a maximum of 64 GB in total. Given the nature of Ryzen and its CCX interconnect tied to the memory speed, we do recommend high-frequency memory. Please make sure you get a 2667 MHz kit or faster. Some motherboard partners offer 'XMP' support, you however are best off configuring memory yourself. So in the BIOS set (if you bought that) a 2667 MHz frequency, insert the advertised timings and voltage as noted on the DDR sticker.
This board supports up to 3 full length discrete VGA cards. Mind you, we can only recommend you go with 2x multi-GPU. Three cards would bog down the 3rd card at a x4 Gen 2 link where two cards (the grey slots) would both get x8 Gen 3.0 PCIe links. As you can see there is an extra 6-pin power header you can use, this feeds extra current towards your PCIe graphics cards slots. You can connect a power cable to it to drive more juice over the PCI-Express slot, it would add another 75 watt capacity. The audio solution is based on a Realtek ALC 1220 CODEC combined with a software suite. If you look closely you can spot high audio grade capacitors. Nichicon Fine Gold capacitors are suited for high-grade audio equipment to provide rich sound in the bass and clearer high frequencies.
It is a bit hard to see on the above photo, but to your upper middle you can see the two M2 slot. It is nothing more than a simple metal cover with pre-applied thermally-conductive gap-filling pad. Designed to be compatible with any length of M.2 SSD, the Shield is hinged at the bottom and clamps down over the top of the device in order to give the chips a larger surface area to bleed off excess heat. NVMe M2 SSDs on a x4 link however are really fast on this platform as our results will show.
- 2 x M.2 Socket 3 connectors
- 6 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors
- 1 x U2 connector (32 Gbps)
