Certainly not a bad price.

Good price and good product. Don't want all that nonsense anyway, so it's nice to see someone catering to this. But I'll probably wait till we have X470/B450...

Considering this doesn't really lack anything that anybody really needed, I'd say this makes for a good product. But... it still boggles my mind why nobody is releasing mATX X370 boards. It's a decent market left completely untouched.

there is the excellent asrock ab350m pro4 in mATX, i use it in the home office. with 2 x m.2 (1 x pcie, 1 x sata) it offers an exceptionally clean build for $90 more or less. a friend of mine is building up his home studio and wanted a DAW... the ATX version will do nicely for not much. plus, for copyrighted material and the extra security you need, there is no built in wifi. wifi AC is very nice and much more secure than N to be sure. i love it on the laptop. call me old school, but i dearly love me some hard wired ethernet. anyway you can buy a wifi AC dongle for $25.

Also AsRock's atx am4 Pro4 boards are great for mining - those are cheapest am4 boards with 6 built-in PCIe. Instead of buying a shitty celeron you can have a great cpu that can even mine you some Monero, Aeon etc =) Also with latest BIOS theese boards kick ass in every aspect. Have my 1700 @3900 mhz pretty stable (though for heavy load you've gotta back up a little)

Ordered mine yesterday. Should be here sometime today! 😀

Nice feature set, other than using Realtek for audio and network.... Those 2 things aside, I'd buy it if it would match my current color scheme....but unfortunately a black/white board would look a bit funny with everything else being black/red....

schmidtbag:

Considering this doesn't really lack anything that anybody really needed, I'd say this makes for a good product. But... it still boggles my mind why nobody is releasing mATX X370 boards. It's a decent market left completely untouched.

Maybe they don't see mATX as being profitable enough to justify? I don't know what sales figures look like for mITX, mATX, ATX and EATX, so just a random guess. Maybe Hilbert could drop an e-mail to a manufacturer or 2 to inquire? There are a couple mITX boards available with reasonable features and the x370 chipset though, if you're looking to build a compact system and only need 1 PCIe x16 slot.

sykozis:

Maybe they don't see mATX as being profitable enough to justify? I don't know what sales figures look like for mITX, mATX, ATX and EATX, so just a random guess. Maybe Hilbert could drop an e-mail to a manufacturer or 2 to inquire?

On the surface, that makes sense. But, I can't imagine it is more profitable for mobo manufacturers to release several full ATX boards using the same couple of chipsets. I mean... for some companies, they don't even change the color scheme, or heatsinks. Though I personally don't want an mATX X370 board, I know there is a market for it. Full ATX X370 boards are a bit underwhelming; the chipset doesn't offer enough features to take advantage of such a form factor. But, you could make a very nice high-end mATX with X370. You could build a small Crossfire/SLI build. You could add more M.2 slots (with 3rd party SATA controllers). There could be x4-lane PCIe slots (maybe even x8) without compromise. I think such features would be appealing to some people, and the market is left completely untouched. If just 1 OEM decided to take a stab at these, it would definitely be profitable.

There are a couple mITX boards available with reasonable features and the x370 chipset though, if you're looking to build a compact system and only need 1 PCIe x16 slot.

I have one of those boards (though I'm a bit bitter about it having X370; it offers no advantage and it adds to the price, but it was the only option at the time). Nowadays, people aren't doing triple-GPU anymore. People aren't using optical drives anymore. SSDs are either 2.5" or M.2, saving even more space. Discrete RAID controllers are rapidly losing popularity. Integrated audio is "sufficient" (I know you probably disagree, but it is enjoyable for most people). Water cooling systems have been shrinking to accommodate smaller cases. Nowadays, it's possible to have a very nice enthusiast's rig with some room for expansion using mATX. But, it's a chicken and egg situation: manufacturers won't think there's an enthusiast market for mATX if nobody will buy them, but nobody is buying them because nobody makes them.

Realtek's ALC1150 and ALC1220 are supposed to be on par with Creative's dedicated cards with typical computer speakers. I haven't tried either of them personally, but it's what I keep reading. The older ALC892, such as what's used on this board, is closer to what the X-Fi XtremeAudio produces. At the end of the day, all that really matters is how it sounds to the user. Some of us do still use optical drives. There is still some software that's only available on cd/dvd. In regards to features, the same can be said of Intel's chipsets. AMD offers enough PCIe lanes with x370 to fill an ATX board with PCIe slots, unlike Intel's z270 chipset. Form factor seems to be more a matter of preference these days than features.

sykozis:

Some of us do still use optical drives. There is still some software that's only available on cd/dvd.

Duly noted - keep in mind I don't even apply to most of the things I mentioned.

In regards to features, the same can be said of Intel's chipsets. AMD offers enough PCIe lanes with x370 to fill an ATX board with PCIe slots, unlike Intel's z270 chipset. Form factor seems to be more a matter of preference these days than features.

I guess I'm used to the pre-PCIe 3.0 days, where it wasn't uncommon to find enthusiast-grade (but still consumer) hardware that had over 40 PCIe lanes. And yes, a full ATX X370 board can fill up all the slots, but only with x1 slots (keep in mind, all those slots are PCIe 2.o, and if it comes with an x4 slot, it degrades itself if any other slots are used). Though that's certainly not a bad thing to have so many, for some people it limits what you could be using. I personally would rather have a single x4 slot than four x1 slots. But as you said, it's all a matter of preference, and that ultimately comes back to my point: there are no options for anyone with such preferences, and I don't think it'd really cost extra to make such a product.