Motherboard are there any other Mini ITX boards besides the Strix x670E-I that has anywhere near the amount of connectivity of that board?

[Sk8rSeth]

I am up against a small time crunch and need to update to AM5 and preferably the 7950X3D, currently in a Formd T1. and i really want to not lose the physical usb ports i have currently, and would LOVE some usb4 40gbps usb-c ports that the Strix x670 board has. however it seems that that is literally the ONLY board in the ITX space with anywhere near that level of connectivity (outside the audio ports but idc about that)

does anyone know of any other x670 boards besides the strix? or maybe its finally time for me to jump ship back over to Intel? can i get good gaming, good workstation and lots of physical connectivity on an intel platform?

 

[Pagusas]

I have that board and love it, curious why you don't want to use it/find an alternative?

 

[Sk8rSeth]

ive just seen a looooot of problems online with that board, many youtubers citing it, BIOS problems and all sorts. not to mention the apparently pretty long boot times and needing to attach the external audio dock thing in order to update the bios.

it just seems like a death from a thousand cuts situation making asus in a bad light, and this board in particular a borderline 'risky' proposition even.

and im coming from the strix b550 on the AMD 3000 series. that board and platform has been nothing but great to me which is why this last few months of Asus news has been a bit of a surprise

 

[Pagusas]

ive just seen a looooot of problems online with that board, many youtubers citing it, BIOS problems and all sorts. not to mention the apparently pretty long boot times and needing to attach the external audio dock thing in order to update the bios.

it just seems like a death from a thousand cuts situation making asus in a bad light, and this board in particular a borderline 'risky' proposition even.

and im coming from the strix b550 on the AMD 3000 series. that board and platform has been nothing but great to me which is why this last few months of Asus news has been a bit of a surprise

I'll say this as someone who's owned it from day oen of release:

1. MANY users had insane long boot times because Asus failed to make "context restore memory timings" default to enabled, it defaults to off, which caused post times to be 30 - 50 seconds even after the first power on/memory test. Enabling it makes post times 2- 4 seconds max, just like any other board. I've helped so many users on multiple forums fix that issue, and its not limited to this boards, its a very common issue with lots of boards runnng ddr5

2. Until recently its BIOS have been undercooked, you had to navigate around some broken/stupid things, but the most recent 1616 bios have been golden and fixed every issue I had, even silly ones like the VRM fan always powering on at 100% for 3 seconds.

3. I have no idea what you mean about "external audio dock thing', do you mean the Asus Hive? If so thats 100% optional to use, you DO NOT need it to update bios (you can update them from any usb port through the bios menu like all boards). I actually love the hive as it allows you to see your post led codes out side the case, making troubleshooting easy. But you can 100% throw it away and never need to use it if you dont want. The audio outs are indeed connected to it, but I never use them (as why would anyone? our GPU's handle uncompressed audio, you have USB-C out for ultra high powered DAC's if you want )

4. Buy it on amazon, try it for a few weeks, and if you run into any issues you can't live with, send it back

Extra: careful installing NVME drives, the default spacers they give you can bend them causing poor contact with the headsink. Its easy to fix by cutting down the spacers, but be mindful of it. Also make sure you read the manual on the little daughter card that has the usb, front pannel headers and cmos reset switch, there are extra headers on it that control PCI-E generation and voltage unlocking. Its actually a nice thing to have, esspeically if you use long riser cables as sometimes they can be flakey and you need to drop to PCI-E gen 3 to make some of them work (I built a lot of rigs, so run into faulty riser cables alot).

 

[Sk8rSeth]

this is great info thank you! all the stuff i had been seeing seems to have been 'launch' problems with ASUS in general this generation. not to mention the GN series on the exploding CPUs. seems that they have gotten their feet back under them and things are stable now though.

the Hive is what i was referring to, two people talking about the mobo at launch had said that you had to specifically use the hive to update the bios instead of directly on the IO shield. glad to hear thats not the case!

 

[scatterforce]

Machines and More has gone over every ITX AM5 board (minus the new A620s). He will be doing a round-up soon, but you might find his videos helpful.

He found the ASUS B650 ITX board far more user-friendly and a better choice for most people. The issue I see for you is that it has 6 USB A ports vs 8 on the X670 and the same number of USB C ports. You are right; looking at the specs of the USB C ports, it looks like the ASUS X670 is the only one with the 40GBs ports. If that's a deal breaker, then you don't have much choice....

 

[Sk8rSeth]

then you don't have much choice

yeah thats what i thought. im not sure if that is a dealbeaker personally but it sure as shit is nice to have. i deal with a lot of video files on external drives so its definitely highly desirable. not to mention my love for VR might take advantage of them at some point soon too.

i think the x670 is the way to go and i just have to put up with the tinkering as the cost of doing business for the greater IO.

was kind of just hoping to avoid ASUS right now if there was another option but alas, SFF is still pretty niche i guess, so we dont have a lot of options. way more than before though. i remember when i was building this first T1 build im currently on, there was like...3 SFX PSUs worth it, and now there are like dozens of 80+ gold+ 700W+ options. theres hope yet lol

 

[scatterforce]

Out of curiosity, I looked at the intel ITX offerings. Asus (again) and ASRock offer 40GBs USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports. The ASRock board looks pretty good with no weird daughterboards and 2 NVME drives on the back instead of the ASUS super-sandwich on the front. Intel is set to refresh its current lineup this fall, but AM5 will have a lot more life.

 

[Sk8rSeth]

that is kind of my dilemma, Intel's motherboards seem much more desirable right now, but to get near the same performance as the 7950x (or x3d) i would have to put a loooot more heat into my system. i switched from intel during the Zen explosion (my last intel chip was a 4770k which is still chugging along in my workshop now) and they do seem to be quite stable which is nice.

does it seem worth it to switch back to intel in your opinion? this is the closest AMD and Intel have been to eachother in years so im a bit on the fence about it honestly

 

[scatterforce]

With Intel, you get one more update with the Raptor Lake Refresh on the 1700 socket this fall. The benefit is that Intel has more feature-rich motherboard options.

With AMD, you get X number of years on AM5. How often did you upgrade your last AMD build? If you did so at all, that should give you an answer as to which direction to go.

Case in point: I have an AM4 build from 2019 in which I'm upgrading the CPU to a 5600x3D. 4 years later and I'm getting a brand new CPU for the build.

 

[wertzius]

ive just seen a looooot of problems online with that board, many youtubers citing it

Sources?

Any AM5 board has longer boot times than you might be used to - how often do yxou boot your system? Does it really matter that you have to wait for 15s longer?

Memory Context Restore should stay disabled if you use decent RAM speeds - enabling it will lead to instability sooner or later.

The Hive is not needed at all - i got a USB-C DAC in case i need to connect headphones, has better quality anyway. The daughterboard is also not needed - but the CMOS jumper sits on it so it might be worth to just connect it for that but i wouldn't connect anything else to it.

I have that board since basically day one (still got a good open box deal) and in the meantime the BIOSes run flawless for me - Thunderbolt works - hybrid graphics works.

 

[Pagusas]

Sources?

Any AM5 board has longer boot times than you might be used to - how often do yxou boot your system? Does it really matter that you have to wait for 15s longer?

Memory Context Restore should stay disabled if you use decent RAM speeds - enabling it will lead to instability sooner or later.

The Hive is not needed at all - i got a USB-C DAC in case i need to connect headphones, has better quality anyway. The daughterboard is also not needed - but the CMOS jumper sits on it so it might be worth to just connect it for that but i wouldn't connect anything else to it.

I have that board since basically day one (still got a good open box deal) and in the meantime the BIOSes run flawless for me - Thunderbolt works - hybrid graphics works.

While the possibility is there, I've been running with Context Restor on for over a year with absolutely no issues, and I'm running extremely overclocked memory with tight custom timings. That's either thanks to Gskill making some really baller memory that has a very wide margin for its voltages, or the initial resistance readings on the last boot before context restore was turned on was perfect, regardless I would suggest exploring the option and enabling it if you hate the long cold reboot times (as I do).