ASUS Announces New X470 Boards For Ryzen

Time a for a new batch of motherboards as AMD releases details of the new X470 chipset that’s set to support the upcoming 2nd gen Ryzen CPUs from AMD. While there are no major breakthroughs, this is a launch aimed at refinement, and ASUS was first out of the gate to show off some of its latest designs.

There are several new boards catering to different segments of the market, from the full bells’n’whistles ROG Crosshair VII Hero, down to the small but powerful Strix X470-I Gaming on mini-ITX, with Prime and TUF filling in the middle grounds. Most of the groundwork was set with the X370 launch, so there isn’t a whole lot that’s new, but there are a lot of subtle changes to the designs, UEFI, and I/O support keeping up with trends.

The biggest invisible change comes down to memory, as this was one of the weak points of the original Ryzen launch – lack of compatibility and instability with timings and frequencies. A lot of work has been done to improve this and the whole x470 range of boards will have memory overclock support up to DDR4-3466 and it should be more achievable with a wider range of memory providers. This is important due to Ryzen being a little more memory sensitive due to the CCX speed being tied to the RAM speed.

All the new boards will come with at least one M.2 slot for storage, as Ryzen CPUs reserve 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 for NVMe SSDs, with the X470 chipset adding another 2x lanes for another SSD – which won’t be enough to max out a top-end SSD, it’s still significantly faster than SATA-based M.2 SSDs.

On the I/O panel on the back, USB 3.1 Gen 2 will come as standard for 10Gbps throughput, with all boards using two USB-A connectors, apart from the Crosshair, which uses a mix of USB-A and Type-C connectors. All the boards apart from the TUF X470-Plus Gaming come with Intel Gigabit Ethernet, with only the TUF making use of a Realtek Ethernet controller.

All boards also come with at least one metal-reinforced PCIe x16 bracket, as is now common for heavy-weight GPUs, the upper-end motherboards will come with two or more metal bracket supports for the PCIe ports. As another universal feature across all the boards is the inclusion of a dedicated AIO header for high-power fans/pumps that can auto-detect between 3-pin DC and 4-pin PWM hardware. This can also run a calibration pass to detect the full operating range of the fan/pump. There are also more headers too, with some boards allowing up to 8 fans/pumps to be connected.

There is a greater emphasis on cooling this time as well, with the software being able to monitor and adjust fan speeds based on zones using specific thermal sensors, or by changing things like the chassis fan based off of the GPU diode temp rather than just the CPU, for those asymmetric workloads where the CPU is idle, but the GPU is flat-out.

On the top-end board, the Crosshair VII Hero, there has been changes to the power management and VRM layout, focused on spreading the load over the VRMs more evenly, switching from an 8+4 layout to a 10+2, since there no display output on the board for APUs. There is also some nifty overclock features such as an external clock generator so you can adjust the base clock without affecting other parts of the chip, on top of the unlocked multiplier. Both of these elements will help with the new XFR2 dynamic clock scaling of the 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs.

One thing that should have some interest from certain readers is that if RGB-mania isn’t your cup of tea, the X470 boards will have UEFI options to completely disable all the RGB lighting, with the Hero going a step further with a blackout mode that even disables the diagnostic LEDs across the entire PCB.

While much of the focus is on the Hero board, the Prime, TUF and Strix boards each fill their niche at lower budgets with features removed for those that do not need/want them. It’s nice to see Mini-ITX still getting some love too, despite the continued difficulty in getting parts that fit together well.

The more budget friendly but feature rich TUF X470-Plus Gaming starts at about $160, with the Prime going for about $185, with the more upper-end Strix X470-F going for $215. The small form factor mini ITX board comes with higher than expected price of $220 due to the complexity of the board, and the ROG Crosshair VII Hero flagship going for $300 (although you can save a bit by opting out of the external wireless unit).

You can read up ASUS’ site for more details and specific configurations for each board.