schmidtbag:

Depending on your budget and what you already have on-hand, you might be able to get started sooner than you think. You could temporarily use a mATX or ATX case until you can afford a new one, and if you get a Ryzen with a box cooler, that ought to hold you over just fine until you can afford a new/better one - the stock heatsinks are surprisingly effective and quiet. That being said, if you hold off OCing just a little bit, you could probably use some crappy 300W PSU from a junked Dell to hold you over. So that just leaves you needing to buy the mobo and CPU (I'm guessing you already have RAM? You didn't mention that).

I have the Ryzen 1700 under Cryorig H7, Asrock x370 Pro, and Corsair Vengeance ddr4 3000 16gb kit, but I'd have to sell the motherboard, psu, and case. Which the case not too worried about since it's the Cougar MX330 that I got super cheap so I can take a hit on that or use it in a build to sell later. Also want to upgrade my 480, but gpu prices man...

Bhagat:

Ok, you are one of the few forum members that I actually respect a lot and I was expecting you or some other forum members to reply. Now, the article. Tell me, how do you review a motherboard when all you are doing is comparing the motherboard being reviewed with 20 different processors on other platforms. A motherboard review is a review when it is compared to boards in the same socket and different generations or with boards of other vendors with same/different chipsets. Just taking tests with a processor and throwing it in a chart with a i7-8700K and a Pentium G4560 and a Ryzen 5 1600 and Threadripper and Skylake-X is pointless and useless. How do I make a decision as to which motherboard to buy from the X470 platform? Opening all the reviews of the different X470 boards in different tabs? Why do I need to compare processors from the 3rd gen Core series and the FX series in a goddamn motherboard review of a 2018 platform? Wouldn't it be more USEFUL if AM4 socket boards were pitched against each other following a standard methodology to test how they fare with a single CPU sample being used for all of them and the same cooler(okay that might change according to heat generated)? IMO the only pages where anything fresh and original is found is the 1st page to the last photograph page, the OC page for that CPU-Z screenshot and the last paragraph of the conclusion page. Everything else is pointless.

Some fair points were made here. Thing is, all reviewers seem to cover different areas more-so than others. When I'm set on buying a product, I'll read all the reviews I can across multiple websites to come to a conclusion on whether I want to purchase it. Sure, reviewer A might go into a more in-depth review of analyzing the circuitry but won't cover other aspects as well a reviewer B. It's no different than car reviews. Someone's looking to buy a new Mclaren performance car. Reviewer A only goes over features, interior, etc but does not cover 0-60, braking test or quarter mile that reviewer B does. So you just have to gather all the information you can across several reviews, no big deal. It's a lot of work to write an article and test something as it is; trying to compile what every other reviewer does into one review will be too much for one person to do IMO. AFAIK HH is a one-man army, whereas tomshardware will have multiple people helping in creating an article.

Darkened_Vision:

Comparing how the same chip overclocks on this board vs other boards (do you need to add more voltage to compensate for v droop? How does the VRM temperature hold up in longer heavy loads?) would be helpful in future reviews.

The overclocks are all the same really. Your bottleneck is the processor, not the motherboard unless it would be really poorly built). Basically, all motherboard will perform roughly the same, all tweaks will be extremely similar and all CPU OC results as such also will be incredibly similar as I use the same proc. I've been mentioning this in all articles, and that is the reality of Ryzen. I am doing the tweaking bit in the processor reviews as you have noticed. Dropping down to the level of explaining vdroop and measuring VRM temps, I can see your point sure, but in the end, we write for a generic audience that understands a bit of voltage tweaking and multipliers, not the nearly pro-overclocking enthusiasts - which is what you are asking. Also, where will it end with articles if I keep measuring every variable and register available? These reviews already eat up 3 days of work and apparently it's still not enough. There simply have to limits time wise. Not all question can be answered for everybody, but the majority of people (hopefully) enjoy what I offer in these motherboards reviews, incl performance metrics from CPU, memory, storage, WIFI and gaming. BTW the mention of 2 sata ports were obviously incorrect, thanks for bringing this to my attention. Fixed.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

Clearly, this website is not for you any longer, you should really move onwards towards other websites and forums to post your shameless, distasteful and respectless insults there. That's all I am, going to shed on this comment though.

If you have been following the thread, we have been talking quite sensibly and in a civil manner since I posted the first comment and clearly many other people seem to feel so including @schmidtbag . I even apologized for the mean way I posted the first comment in the following reply and said I appreciated your hard work but it could be invested in a better way for the website. Dear Hilbert, I respect you and your opinions a lot and keep coming back to this website about 5 times a day to check for new articles and posts. But it clearly seems you are too determined to not take any constructive criticism and have a problem with anybody that tries to have a different opinion other than you. The way you replied clearly shows how things have gotten bad. You could have been civil and put me off in a gentlemanly way. The only "insult" if you call it so was the word "worthless" and I explained why I said so. Now I am sure many people here will jump up to blindly support you like the person who replied to me immediately following my first post where he had no counter arguments other than he loved you a lot. Just like everybody else as well as me. I love your articles and care about them and this is why I am taking out the time to write these. Had I not cared, I wouldn't have bothered. Trust me, 90% of your followers don't read more than 2 lines in these motherboard reviews except look at the pictures and then they post, "Great review Hilbert" because they love you, not the article. Anyways, I wrote all this to point out the fact that no one knows or cares about Guru3D like they used to back in the days because of these lackluster articles. Hope it gets to you, because you seem to be getting more upset when criticism is thrown at you. Good day.

vbetts:

I have the Ryzen 1700 under Cryorig H7, Asrock x370 Pro, and Corsair Vengeance ddr4 3000 16gb kit, but I'd have to sell the motherboard, psu, and case. Which the case not too worried about since it's the Cougar MX330 that I got super cheap so I can take a hit on that or use it in a build to sell later. Also want to upgrade my 480, but gpu prices man...

Unless you need an STX (or smaller) PSU, why not keep what you've got? The 1700 is still a good CPU by today's standards and would work fine in an ITX build, even a slim one, so I'd say you could still keep that too, even if temporarily. As for GPUs, keep your eyes peeled, because it seems price drops are on the horizon. Not only are GPUs beginning to have worse ROIs in mining, but there are ASICs that are making for enticing alternatives. Hope is in sight. At least the 480 is still a good GPU - I'd advise you wait for next-gen products anyway.

Bhagat:

More than enough 400 series reviews exists on this website. I don't ask him to do something that's not available. He has already done those reviews. Just post their numbers in a table and make an article.

A table of what? Most of what you need to know you can find out yourself just by looking at the spec sheets.

You destroy your own standpoint with the sentence you wrote after this. And like I said, everything that you state above is available on Pages 1 to 6, 28 and 29. What Hilbert has to give is his opinion on how the boards stack up against each other.

How do I destroy my own standpoint? I already told you that Hilbert looks at these boards in an objective perspective, and leaves it to you to figure out if they're worth getting. I would argue the results he provides help you decide that.

We want to know how it compares to other boards from the competitors, how the VRMs handle the heat, how well it overclocks, how much voltage he needed, memory support

Why couldn't you have [politely] requested this in your original comment? All of these are great ideas to add to the articles, but as I like to state to people in your situation: it doesn't matter how right you are if you're coming across as a jerk. When your first response is offensive, you opinions will go un-heard. Diplomacy is crucial when you want change. It seems to me you now understand this, but I hope you can remember this in future situations.

Agent-A01:

Some fair points were made here. Thing is, all reviewers seem to cover different areas more-so than others. When I'm set on buying a product, I'll read all the reviews I can across multiple websites to come to a conclusion on whether I want to purchase it. Sure, reviewer A might go into a more in-depth review of analyzing the circuitry but won't cover other aspects as well a reviewer B. It's no different than car reviews. Someone's looking to buy a new Mclaren performance car. Reviewer A only goes over features, interior, etc but does not cover 0-60, braking test or quarter mile that reviewer B does. So you just have to gather all the information you can across several reviews, no big deal. It's a lot of work to write an article and test something as it is; trying to compile what every other reviewer does into one review will be too much for one person to do IMO. AFAIK HH is a one-man army, whereas tomshardware will have multiple people helping in creating an article.

There are many one man armies who do better. What I suggested would in fact lessen the amount of work that he would have to do. Just compare motherboards from same class. Not telling him to copy the way others work, but going through 29 pages of no information is painful.

Bhagat, criticism is fine, as always. Your initial comment, however, is completely disrespectful, you should have started where you ended. Anyway, sorry you feel the articles are lackluster. Again, this website is likely not something for you anymore. Take care.

Bhagat:

There are many one man armies who do better. What I suggested would in fact lessen the amount of work that he would have to do. Just compare motherboards from same class. Not telling him to copy the way others work, but going through 29 pages of no information is painful.

Who else writes an article, proof reads an article, does testing in their own spare time, etc by themselves? Even relatively new places like Gamers-nexus(Hilbert why are you renaming this to disney) is more than one person. Point is, it's a ton of work to have to do a new article from scratch for every board(when 90% are basically the same thing with similar features)

schmidtbag:

A table of what? Most of what you need to know you can find out yourself just by looking at the spec sheets. How do I destroy my own standpoint? I already told you that Hilbert looks at these boards in an objective perspective, and leaves it to you to figure out if they're worth getting. I would argue the results he provides help you decide that. Why couldn't you have [politely] requested this in your original comment? All of these are great ideas to add to the articles, but as I like to state to people in your situation: it doesn't matter how right you are if you're coming across as a jerk. When your first response is offensive, you opinions will go un-heard. Diplomacy is crucial when you want change. It seems to me you now understand this, but I hope you can remember this in future situations.

A chart of performance with different motherboards. I apologized before and I apologize again. Usually doesn't happen like this in the forums. I do get this and I will follow your advise in the future.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

Bhagat, criticism is fine, as always. Your initial comment, however, is completely disrespectful, you should have started where you. ended. Anyway, sorry you feel the articles are lackluster. Again, this website is likely not something for your anymore. Take care.

Nothing you say will stop me from coming back to Guru3D. i hope you will forgive me for my initial outburst and I hope you can actually look through the words into why I did so. Anyways, I follow you on twitter and stuff and you are a good man. Seems to me motherboard reviews will still be a no-go for me at Guru3D.

Agent-A01:

Who else writes an article, proof reads an article, does testing in their own spare time, etc by themselves?

Phoronix is pretty much entirely operated by 1 person. He also attends conferences, develops his own benchmark suite, and I believe he maintains his own web server. He also sometimes performs the same tests across every major OS. I honestly don't know how he gets any sleep, or how he isn't burnt out after roughly 15 years. All that being said, I'd have to say his proof reading is abysmal, and quality does slip sometimes, but I cut him some slack since I know I could never pull off what he does - I don't think most people could, hence your point.

Bhagat:

A motherboard review is a review when it is compared to boards in the same socket and different generations or with boards of other vendors with same/different chipsets. Just taking tests with a processor and throwing it in a chart with a i7-8700K and a Pentium G4560 and a Ryzen 5 1600 and Threadripper and Skylake-X is pointless and useless. How do I make a decision as to which motherboard to buy from the X470 platform?...

The problem with motherboard reviews is that there is so little performance variation between them that tests easily fall within margin of error. IMO, the only useful info I get from mobo reviews are their features, ports/inputs, slots, dimensions, etc. The performance parameters are virtually irrelevant with same CPUs.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

The overclocks are all the same really. Your bottleneck is the processor, not the motherboard unless it would be really poorly built). Basically, all motherboard will perform roughly the same, all tweaks will be extremely similar and all CPU OC results as such also will be incredibly similar as I use the same proc. I've been mentioning this in all articles, and that is the reality of Ryzen.

Fair enough, the max OC won't change between boards, I understand that. my specific reasoning for these questions is that many (almost all?) last-gen SFF motherboards had poor VRM quality which led to a bottleneck in an 8-core overclock. I already own a b350 mATX motherboard, but due to overheating VRM's at 1.39 volts I haven't been able to push my CPU as far as I would like. And my motherboard has vdroop all the way down to 1.36 when under full load, which is unacceptable to me. I'm passing the motherboard along to my girlfriend for her new 2200G build which won't be overclocked, so I want to make sure my new purchase makes sense for my use case. I hope you understand I took time out of my day to express my opinion because I do respect the work you put into this, but feel some mistakes were made in the review of this board. I don't expect you to spend an exorbitant amount of time reviewing each board, but perhaps focusing more of your time on overclocking features for an overclocking board will help more of your readers understand the product. Perhaps comparing it just to the previous gen x370-i from Asus would have gone a long way to show the improvements Asus made in this board. Also, I want to apologize for my original comment was rude. I do not mean to insult you in any way. Thank you.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

No, your GPU would run at x8 PCIe Gen3, and not even a 1080 Ti would full that up in terms of bandwidth. Realistically though, how many people would actually use 2x M2? I think most will use just one for the OS and then add SATA3 SSDs/HDDs for volume storage. BTW there was a mistake in the review, listing just two SATA3 ports, it obviously has four. This has been corrected.

Thanks for clearning that up, i was going off the info on page 4: 'If you use the second M2 slot your GPU will revert towards x4 mode, so that 8 PCIe lanes are freed up, four of them will be assigned towards the second M2 device, so that's a full speed connection. If you do not want that, you can switch in the BIOS, and have the 2nd M2 slot pull 4 lanes from the chipset, these, however, are PCIe Gen 2.0, and that halves the bandwidth then.' And yer, i guess realistically it wouldnt be that many people but if its there, id like to use it to its full potential. Also thanks for the SATA info, two ports was kind of putting me off as my current setup includes 1ssd plus two HDD's (although ill look to replace them with just 1 4tb drive).

Pawel04:

hanks for clearning that up, i was going off the info on page 4:

That should have been written better. I'll rewrite that part a little, but no your primary slot will not drop below x8 Gen3.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

That should have been written better. I'll rewrite that part a little, but no your primary slot will not drop below x8 Gen3.

Lovely, thanks! And thanks for the top review 😉

Darkened_Vision:

lso, I want to apologize for my original comment was rude. I do not mean to insult you in any way.

Your comment wasn't insulting at all ergo a reply from my side, but thanks for caring 😉 I'll have a rethink on the OC part of the articles. I am really not sure we need to go all the way up-to the level of VRM temp measurements in the tweaking bit. There's more to it than that, most of the time it's not measurable with internal sensors let alone we can not magically assume the offsets are setup right, or the mobo even supported in software like hwinfo and aida, ergo you need external measurements to be objective. Then again, I do have a FLIR camera that can deal with that very well. I'll have a think about it.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

Your comment wasn't insulting at all ergo a reply from my side, but thanks for caring 😉 I'll have a rethink on the OC part of the articles. I am really not sure we need to go all the way up-to the level of VRM temp measurements in the tweaking bit. There's more to it than that, most of the time it's not measurable with internal sensors let alone we can not magically assume the offsets are setup right, or the mobo even supported in software like hwinfo and aida, ergo you need external measurements to be objective. Then again, I do have a FLIR camera that can deal with that very well. I'll have a think about it.

Yeah, of course you should cater to the average reader, not crazy people like me! I personally feel you spent too much time running benchmarks on the CPU when there should be little difference between boards. I read this as a 2700x review with the motherboard review included. I feel some of the CPU benchmark time could instead have been used on the overclocking of this board. I know time spent is important (I say as I waste an hour or two at work), so I definitely don't expect you to spend a week reviewing this board, just wish you had highlighted more of the differences this board has with it's competitors.

Bhagat:

Nothing against how much he puts into the website. I have been following him and the website for literally my entire life. Reading the comments section has nothing to do with what I criticized the review for and I appreciate that he is among the very few reviewers and moderators who do so. I am sorry if my comment hurt you or made you feel it was mean. This was something genuine and considering you had no logical responses to any of the points I made other than "feeling empty", I think somewhere in the back of your mind, you agreed to my thoughts. I love Hilbert's work and its this concern which made me comment today. Had I been not bothered, I wouldn't have commented at all.

When I posted that I had not seen your second comment. I am glad level heads prevailed here, part of what makes Guru3D's forums one of the more pleasant places to hang out. It was good to hear some of your points in the end too. (I am one of those that actually still feels it is worth honoring a write up by actually reading it, besides I enjoy HH's light hearted writing style )

schmidtbag:

Unless you need an STX (or smaller) PSU, why not keep what you've got? The 1700 is still a good CPU by today's standards and would work fine in an ITX build, even a slim one, so I'd say you could still keep that too, even if temporarily. As for GPUs, keep your eyes peeled, because it seems price drops are on the horizon. Not only are GPUs beginning to have worse ROIs in mining, but there are ASICs that are making for enticing alternatives. Hope is in sight. At least the 480 is still a good GPU - I'd advise you wait for next-gen products anyway.

The cases I want for an ITX build doesn't take ATX PSUs. like the Node 202 or the Raven. CPU I'm not changing out at least. Possibly gonna wait until Vega 2 to see what happens.