The problem with having 5 of one type of motherboard (for the manufacturer you bought it from) is that you know how four of them behave when one of them goes south.
One of the two I have been using for my advanced Ryzen Master tweaks was not doing what the other four were generally speaking doing.
I had swapped PSU's, SSD's, RAM and CPU as well as GPU and still saw the same problem on this particular troublesome motherboard.
I am still torn between the PSU and the motherboard from a logical analysis POV but the fact is this Motherboard is not controlling the things like fans and RGB or in fact PCI-e components without blue screening.
The most egregiously observed failure event is with any of my many WiFi 6E NIC cards.
Now, we all know what utter shite all of these Chinese made AX200/210/220 NICs really are, mostly because of the dire soldering that looks like it was done by the blind and deaf army that evidently puts them together somewhere in Guangdong province with the aid of sightless dogs for the disabled masses of said province that are obviously employed by these many manufacturers to do the excruciatingly bad soldering work.
That is to say the solder work was done either by the blind humans or the blind dogs or a combination thereof.
This dire reality is actually what spurred my action to getting another Motherboard with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi already built into the Motherboard and after the multiple MSI X570 Motherboard failures I experienced I ruled out that manufacturer for further consideration, like evah!
These Motherboard manufacturers are almost all from Taiwan by the way and Taiwan is a whole bunch different to mainland China in almost all ways.
There is also a company in India that makes motherboards but the quality of that fare is pretty dire and I seriously advise you not to bother.
In the end, I whittled down the choice between AS Rock or ASUS and despite my desire to go with one of these two Taiwanese Motherboard vendors, I have issues with the alleged "brand new" items and went for the feedback that stated the components being shipped were in fact brand new.
Despite Amazon claiming said motherboards are new, I have yet to receive a new one from them from any manufacturer.
In the end I gullibly went for the ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Plus (WiFi) board because many folks said theirs had actually arrived brand new.
Mine, predictably, did not.
This is, generally speaking, a big problem.
Now, the test units I get from the various manufacturers for the video testing we do are known to work items that usually arrive with an engineer to install in one of my test rig open chassis systems and they demonstrate it all works with me checking the obvious when it does not.
My own fare I buy online through one of many online retailers.
The lab test rig setup on the lab bench has some expensive voltage measurement gear and I can even supply smooth and regulated power with the right cables from my lab gear without a PSU in the case, for up to 22 desktop computers.
I use the lab for my many electronics projects using these power systems for testing as well.
This rig rapidly proves out components that are not behaving as they should.
I also have a separate PSU tester but PSU testing does nothing for a PSU diode that randomly fails under certain load and power conditions and then pretends nuthin is wrong.
A more common problem than you would believe is possible, I can tell ya!
I cannot tell you how many times I have ripped apart a PSU and replaced coils, diodes and capacitors with good high quality Japanese components as an automatic reaction to the godawful components my eyes clock in the circuit board I just laid bare.
As a rule I try not to open PC power supplies to gawk at their godawfulness....
I am damn near to building my own AM5 PC Boards for my own home built AM5 PSU again with high quality components using P-CAD like I did back in the days of 286 and 386 home computers, because back then nobody in Taiwan had a single idea on how to do it right and I actually broke my rule and looked at the damn thing in the sole 7950X Rig....
AM5 Motherboards need an AM5 capable PSU unit by the way......
I was so good at doing this PSU re-engineering thang that Telkom had me do this for almost all their Olivetti desktops and all their Netlan 5000 Novell Netware servers back in the day.
I built power supply units for almost 15,000 computers back then.
My boss Louis B almost gave birth to elephants because I used the most expensive components possible and this project ran into millions of South African Rands but Blackie Le Hout, (his boss) and I had an evil plan in place there...
I actually had a thriving side business making ruggedized PSU for HP and Compaq servers running Novell Netware and then SCO Unix that bought me a Cessna or three.
Africa suffers from serious lightning strikes and having power systems with spark gap arresters in them were actually a must have out there.
My series 1 Mk 1 400W PSU was so good I believe the ones they still have running in Pretoria in the Telkom Computing museum are all running my near immortal PSU.
The upside was these computers running my Power supplies had a reliability so high I think the only ones that did fail were due to ladies spilling nail varnish remover all over the Olivetti M24 workstation motherboards and it was usually everything else except my PSU that fried when this happened.
I can probably write a book on what secretaries poured on desktop computers to get them to fail by the way.........
This is also why I am so picky about darn keyboards these days....
I have yet to find a suitable keyboard that can stand up to the abuse from Telkom exec secretaries daily operating procedures...
But I digress.
In any event, said ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Plus (WiFi) motherboard was picked because I never bought a bad Motherboard from ASUS and I have had a lot of ASUS motherboards since 1992.
FYI, there is a Version II of this board available from the ASUS online store for $20 more.
This TUF Gaming X570-Plus (WiFi) was the easiest and fastest motherboard install I ever did in my life by the way.
I heeded all the touted warnings on Amazon and downloaded all the drivers in advance but I need not have bothered as a funny thing happened during the Windows 11 install..
So I shove my Win 11 USB in the suggested 10 GB USB boot port, it installs Windows 11, then reboots, then immediately fires up an app called Armory Crate, post install bootup....
WTF!! I think frantically to myself, A virus already!! That was quick!
Then I realize this is just the motherboard calling home to Taipei a la Apple Laptop..
The ASUS website is Godawful by the way.
I had to log in about 15 times as clicking the country options do not work so I went with the generic settings but I was seriously unimpressed with this piss poor website as it keeps wiping out selections and you find yourself typing in sh1t from the beginning all the time.
It actually took more time to get to the drivers on their web site than it took to install the board and install Windows 11!
Once you are in Armory Crate then proceeds to download all the drivers, BIOS and utility apps the thing needs without me using the USB that had them already all on it.
It did not install the BIOS though.
Amazingly, all the basic generic Audio, LAN and WiFi drivers had been loaded by Windows 11 in the basic setup already!
ASUS have obviously been working with Redmond rather more closely than usual...
After a few reboots and a massively huge Windows update session later, all I had to do was run Armory Crate again for the latest update shit.
However, I did use the USB for the latest BIOS update which was 4.6 as it did not think it needed to move from 4.4 for some reason.
It also scored near what I had tuned the Aorus Elite to after 10 days of futzing, right out the box when I ran userbenchmark on its pretty silicon ass!
The WiFi and Bluetooth on this motherboard are awesome to behold by the way.
This is a new experience for me, shit right out the box that does what it is supposed to do!
However, the Motherboard box and it's contents that duly arrived from Amazon was not brand new as advertised and one SSD heatsink was missing from the Motherboard as well the screws and Motherboard mounting items they usually come with.
I am not sure if this is the default situation for ASUS but the MSI X570 Motherboards all come with dual M2 heatsinks.
The pictures for this ASUS motherboard only show the bottom M2 slot armed with said heatsink gizmo.
This is not a dire show stopper problem for me as I literally have dozens of Cuban Cigar boxes full of computer related screws and all sorts of connector cables et al from the myriad of tests I do for the video assessment stuff.
I was pleasantly surprised this ASUS Motherboard actually went in my MSI case so easily and benchmarked so well but the soaking in benchmark tests will run through Friday and by then I will know if it is a keeper.
I will also do a few curve optimizer sessions....
It passed all stability and soaking tests and I am using it heavily as a Workstation and it is superb so far! (04082023).
The layout of this motherboard is actually far superior to anything MSI and Gigabyte make in my humble opinion.
As an awarded PCB designer myself I am pretty impressed with this one and I dug up a certificate out the shoddy box it came in that claimed all sorts of mil standards of compliance on a certificate of Reliability.
I had my secretary research these and she gave me an even longer list than that which is on said certificate!
One of them was the salt spray test so I will be buying two for my Ocean going yacht and seeing how they perform in the open sea.
It also fit rather well into the MSI Gungnir 100R case I put it into, as I mentioned above.
I just had to fit the backplate to the case that covered the USB, Audio, WiFi and other ports and wriggle the motherboard slightly and it just clicked into place like a glove with some added focus on the Dark Pro 4 AM4 clamping system that has 4 screws and a few plates etc.
Of course, the BIOS is a tad weird but seems almost identical to the Aorus stuff I had grown used to these past 6 years, only in blue with different descriptors for shit.
The ASUS BIOS update is care of the ASUS EZ tool and it works real swell.
The twin WD_BLACK SN850 500 GB NVMe 4.0 SSD are running at 111 degrees F which was the same as in the Aorus Elite X570 it replaced.
This ASUS X570 does not have a 14 pin SPI TPM in it either and it is running Windows 11 just fine although I did see some frame jitters in Assassins Creed every now and again which is the signature vTPM BIOS reading characteristic.
I must order a SPI TPM module for it at some point but this will require removal of the Dark Pro 4 cooling gizmo as the TPM module is rather close to the CPU - where it should be but.....oh my, the getting it in piece....Oi Vey! I shoulda ordered one with the mobo...
The other morning I checked the benchmark fail rates and it was all clean, Day 3 benchmark soaking passed with flying colors.
Friday April 7th at 11 AM it will be ready for registering but I will be having a conversation with Amazon about paying the new price for 2nd hand gear......
Me No like this practice a whole bunch....
And the band as they say, played on....
Hopefully it will not make me feel like the band playing Vivaldi's four seasons on the deck of the Titanic as it went under either...
Do you have any idea what bravery that shit must have been for those musicians on the Titanic by the way?
Sends shudders down my spine it does...