Review on 💻 ASUS ROG Strix X570-E Gaming ATX Motherboard- PCIe 4.0, Aura Sync RGB Lighting, 2.5 Gbps & Intel Gigabit LAN, WIFI 6 (802.11Ax), Dual M.2 Heatsinks by Adam Clemons

I paired this with an R7 2700x to replace my old FX9590 and Asus M5A99FX Pro. Build quality seems really good, everything felt solid and was built to tight tolerances. After putting everything together (using a Gskill TridentZ Neo 32GB 3200 16D) the first boot was successful and the BIOS entered. The BIOS is feature rich and seems easy to use if you're used to the BIOS on previous Asus boards. The second boot ran into some problems, none of my nvme disks were recognized; I used 2 in the slots on the board and 1 in the PCI-E slot. It should be noted that one of my nvme m2 drives didn't fit on the board as it already had a heatsink, but I just moved it into the PCI-E slot. However, I had to change some BIOS settings to recognize all my drives. I also updated the BIOS with no problems. After starting the operating system, I tried to install various programs and utilities. HERE THE WAGE LOSES A STAR! I can see the Asus software hasn't improved since my previous board! Weapon Box - None of the functions worked, with the possible exception of half the lighting effects. Avoid this software for now. Aura Lighting - Consumes CPU resources at a constant rate. The task manager shows that the aura lighting service is constantly consuming 8% of the CPU; in contrast to Corsair's lighting service, which consumes 0.8%. It should be noted that both Armory Crate and Aura are detected by Easy AntiCheat (Apex Legends) as cheat programs or software mods and you cannot play while they are running. AI Suite 3 is definitely better than 2, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. The integrated Wi-Fi is fast and stable. I plan to get a new router soon to make the most of it. I ran memtest and checked everything, so I set the RAM to 3200 in the BIOS with automatic settings and ran the test again. I have about 12 errors. I went back into the BIOS and increased the RAM voltage from 1.35 to 1.38 and that seems to have fixed the errors. I've only been using it for a few days and so far everything looks fine (apart from bad software utilities). Will be updated in the future after further use. UPDATE 11/28/19: Fixed the conflict with Easy AntiCheat, making the software much less annoying. UPDATE 12/24/19: The latest BIOS gives me a lot of headaches on lighting controls. Armory Crate doesn't recognize any devices, not even the motherboard's own RGB lighting, and AURA doesn't even open. I've gone through the process of uninstalling and reinstalling multiple times with no success. I'm not sure if this is related either, but my PC won't wake up from sleep now. I need to restart the system. That wasn't the case before the BIOS update to 1405, but who knows. UPDATE 1-1-20. The hang mentioned in my previous update was related to the Intel WiFi and LAN drivers; Instead of using the ones from the ASUS website again, I downloaded the Intel driver and Support Assistant and installed the drivers over them and haven't had any issues since. To fix AURA lighting issues I had to uninstall AURA and Armory Crate, go into the registry and manually remove LightingControl references in at least two places. I then reinstalled AURA and it seems to be working, at least for now. UPDATE 03/30/20: I finally gave up on Aura and reinstalled Armory Crate. Armory Crate works much better now and Aura was causing me to crash. I used the raidXpert utility to create two RAID0 setups. First, use the onboard NVME slots and 2 WD Black. Second, I used nvme-pcie and 2wd black nvme adapter with heatsink. Both works without problems. I also set up storeMI Drive, an AMD utility that takes an SSD, a mechanical drive, and some of your RAM to create a large single "drive" that runs at the speed of an SSD but with the capacity of a mechanical drive is running. Drive; pretty neat. It should be noted that the length of the WLAN antenna cable is very short. I almost ripped out the WiFi card while adjusting the height of the table. Oops! The whole computer shut down when this happened, I thought I must have screwed it up, but a little wiggling got it back into place.