Review on ASUS Prime X570-P Ryzen 3 AM4: PCIe Gen4, Dual M.2 HDMI, SATA 6GB/s USB 3.2 Gen 2 ATX Motherboard - Top Performance and Connectivity for Ryzen CPUs by Douglas Holla

Good mid-range MoBo for mid-2020 gamers. It has one downside, which I'll address below. Pros: X-570 chipset with PCIE 4.0 support. Slots for 2 GPU cards and 2 M.2 SSDs. Support for AMD Ryzen processors and (possibly) some of the latest Athlon processors (see specifications on ASUS website). The PCIE 4.0 bus offers consumers the maximum available data bandwidth. MoBo pricing as of May 2020. 4 DDR4 DRAM slots up to 128GB. 6 SATA connectors 3 case fan headers and 1 CPU fan header 1 water cooling pump header Full-size ATX, not Micro-ATX CONS: I only found 2: (a) All PCI-E expansion slots. If you have optional legacy PCI cards such as a 1394 Firewire card, a dial-up modem for sending and receiving faxes, or an RS-232 serial card, you cannot use them on this MoBo. PCI-E and PCI are completely different connectors. Therefore, if you still need these I/O types, you will need to purchase new PCI-E 1.0 slot expansion cards for them. Your old peripheral cards are now museum pieces, just like IDE hard drives or AGP graphics cards. Technologies evolve. (b) Only one HDMI port on the I/O panel. If you are using an AMD "G" series CPU and do not install a separate GPU card, you can only use 1 monitor. It would be nice if the MoBo had two HDMI ports or 1 HDMI and 1 DVI-D so it could natively support two monitors with one GPU card. This MoBo is definitely geared towards gaming, so perhaps ASUS designers will assume that almost all buyers of this MoBo will install a GPU on it. But that doesn't mean it can't be used to build an office PC, a CADD/engineering PC, or a photo/video editing setup. It has plenty of USB ports, and if you don't want to shell out the extra money for a GPU card, you can opt for an AMD "G" series processor with integrated graphics. If you go that route, MoBo has an HDMI output with a maximum resolution of 4096 x 2160 at 24Hz. So it supports a single 4K monitor at 30Hz, or a 2K monitor at 60Hz if you don't want multiple monitors or need. What I built with this MoBo: A general purpose home PC. I wanted Microsoft FSX to be able to run in maximum landscape quality at at least 30fps, and with the GPU and CPU I chose it can actually run on dual 2160p monitors without pushing the CPU over 60% or the GPU over 40 % .Processor: AMD Ryzen 5-3600. This is a 6-core 12-thread processor running at 3600MHz idle and up to 4100MHz under heavy FSX load. I did not overclock the processor, at first it works at such frequencies. Graphics card: ASUS Radeon 5500XT. This GPU has 3 display ports and 1 HDMI port, so it could theoretically drive four 4K monitors at 30Hz if the card specs are correct. SSD: I installed a 500GB Seagate m.2 SSD. It boots Windows 10 Home Edition in 11 seconds from the completion of POST to the moment the desktop appears and the PC is ready to use. 11 seconds is incredibly fast compared to booting Windows 10 from a 5400RPM hard drive (this can take up to 6 full minutes). DRAM: Four 16GB Viper 3200MHz DDR4 modules. They fit perfectly on the board. I assembled the car three weeks ago and so far everything is working great. I'm currently using it with two ASUS 4K gaming monitors. Builder's Opinion: MoBo was very easy to use as a basis for further development. The Ryzen 5-3600 processor and heatsink/fan use a screw mount instead of the spring clips used in the Gen 2 Athlon processors, so I had to remove the clip hooks from the MoBo. This was easy to do with a screwdriver: MoBo is designed to mount any type of AMD processor. It comes standard with clips installed. If you have a CPU heatsink and fan that uses four screws instead of spring clips, remove the clip hooks from the MoBo and reuse the steel backplate that the clip hooks were attached to - four screws from the CPU fan following the same pattern and screw directly into the same holes on the back. Installing four DIMMs, a GPU card and an SSD card was easy and the connectors are of good quality. Connecting various power cables from the power supply was not difficult. It would be nice if there was another chassis fan header: I had to connect two chassis fans (two top fans) to one header with a splitter. I had to push pretty hard to connect the large main power cord. All six SATA ports are fairly accessible. Four of these are vertical (facing outward), the other two are mounted on the front edge of the board. Connecting the patch cords to the front of the case was easy enough: the MoBo manual was well written and easy to interpret which ports were for which I/O cable. MoBo supports a pair of internal LEDs. Strips I haven't used and it has a power connector for the water cooling pump which I use for one of the case fans. BIOS: The Bios UI menu was easy to use. I don't overclock my systems, but the BIOS supports it if you want. Setting up the boot device order so that the BIOS boots Windows 10 from the DVD drive for the initial setup was easy. I've built other PCs over the years for which booting the BIOS from a CD or DVD was a daunting task and very difficult to figure out how to do. Not this BIOS - very simple and nothing abstruse. Installing Windows 10 Home on an SSD was easy and took less than 10 minutes. The machine booted Windows perfectly the first time. Final Thoughts: I'm not an avid gamer, but I think in the $120-$175 MoBo price range, this board would be a pretty good base for building a gaming system: It supports up to 128GB DRAM in 4 modules, definitely a plus , has two PCIe 16 slots for graphics cards (one is PCIE 4.0, the other is PCIE 3.0) as well as two M.2. Slots for SSD. With 6 SATA ports, you can use 4 hard drives and two 5.25" internal optical drives if you still use them. I don't know much about RAID, but I think the BIOS on this board supports it. Since I can't use any of my old PCI cards (the 1394 Firewire card was the only one I really needed to connect the camcorder to the PC), I really like this MoBo. I've put together about a dozen PCs that I've built, thanks in large part to the thoughtful layout of this MoBo. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED