A few things to note. Any temperature below 80c is to be considered very cool, VRM temps only start to become a concern when they exceed 90c, and even then there's still 10-20c worth of headroom before most boards will thermal throttle. Below 80c is very safe and will never present an issue, so all X670 boards are well within safe limits. Wi-Fi 6E (6GHz band) will be supported by Microsoft Windows 11. The availability will depend on the different regulation status of each country and region. It will be activated (for supported countries) through Windows Update and software updates once available. The extra large aluminum alloy M.2 heatsink effectively improves heat dissipation to keep those high speed M.2 SSDs as cool as possible, it is able to give better stability while maintaining top performance. GPU only covers 1 m.2 slot, but the other 3 are still accessible without removing the gpu, even with a 7900xtx red devil installed.

Modern and futuristic, with the attractive specifications and perfect balance, the Race Sport (RS) Edition is the evolution of the most popular PRO series motherboard. Its unique path takes aim at mainstream DIYers that drives an undeniable performance and trustable computing experience without a pricey upgrade. RaceSport edition, your all-rounder motherboard that fulfills every task and light-loading gaming – with style and speed!For recording temperatures we're using a digital thermometer with K-Type thermocouples and we'll be reporting the peak rear PCB temperature. Finally, we're not reporting Delta-T over Ambient, instead I maintain a room temperature of 21 degrees and to ensure a consistent ambient temperature a thermocouple is positioned next to the test system. Usually we'd go over each motherboard, talk about the key features, the heatsinks, and the VRM components, but we've got 22 boards, so spending a few minutes on each one isn't all that interesting for this roundup. Instead we'll jump straight into VRM thermal testing, then brush over a spec comparison table, before making some actual board recommendations, so let's get into it. Test System and Notes Asus is the only brand to offer a Mini-ITX X670E board, and they're also the only brand to also offer a MicroATX X670E board. So that means we have one Mini-ITX, one MicroATX and 20 ATX boards on hand. For some reason Gigabyte spent their PCIe 5.0 budget on the M.2 drives, limiting the PCIe slot support to a single x16 slot. So while we guess four PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots is nice, we'd rather have the flexibility of having more PCIe slots.

The USB complement is good, with a total of ten rear ports. There are two 3.2 Gen 2 ports (one of which is Type-C) plus four 3.2 Gen 1 and four 2.0 ports. Internal headers can provide another eight ports plus the all-important USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 type-C. Compares to conventional DIP style PCIe slot, the SMT type PCIe slot improves signal flow and maximize stability under high speed, a key breakthrough to fully support the lighting speed of the latest PCIe 5.0 standard. The latest PCI Express 5.0 is capable to perform a breathtaking bandwidth of 128GBps, ready to unleash the full potential of future high end graphic cards. Still, if you were to use PCIe 5.0 devices this configuration would make the most sense, as both delivers would receive x8 PCIe 5.0 bandwidth which is 32 GB/s. In comparison the Asus ROG Strix X670E-F Gaming connects its secondary PCIe x16 slot chipset, which is a lot cheaper to wire in, but does limit you to PCIe 4.0 x4 bandwidth (8 GB/s). The best high-end X670E motherboard is simply the MSI MEG X670E ACE. The stupid expensive Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme and MSI MEG X670E Godlike are excellent motherboards, but we can't justify the asking prices, especially in the case of the Godlike. i do agree though that covering the m.2 slot with a gpu, does take away using the heatsinks and such that can be needed or are just pretty to look at. i'm not sure where you could move it though to keep it close to the cpu, yet not under the gpu. lowering the pcie slot to put it above the gpu, though not very far, would add to the latency of the gpu and people would lose their freaking minds if some reviewer showed .2 fps less or some other trivial number due to moving it the couple inches.Across the bottom of the board are several exposed headers. You’ll find the usual, including additional USB ports, RGB headers, and more. Below is a complete list from left to right. The ROG Strix X670E-I Gaming is an impressive ITX board, using ten 110A power stages for the vcore it ran very cool and although it features active cooling it was always silent in our testing. Admittedly, we tested it under the same conditions as all the other boards, so in a cramped ITX case it will likely run a bit hotter, but we're confident it's up to the task.

The onboard sound is not good. I get bad distortions in sound as if something is interfering with the sound circuits or controller. It's an extreme motherboard as well, the 16 teamed 110A powerstage vcore VRM is no joke, there's two PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, USB4 support, loads of USB ports, onboard buttons, debug LED codes, 2.5 Gbit LAN and WiFi 6, it's an impressive but also ultra expensive mATX motherboard. Over the past few months we've been gathering as many AMD X670 motherboards as we could to test their VRM performance and to see if they can all handle the Ryzen 9 7950X without any kind of thermal throttling, something we ran into with a number of X570 motherboards a few years ago. Clearly there are people using this specific mobo without issues so it's highly unlikely that there is a fundamental design issue with this mobo as all motherboard makers work from AMDs design guide. More than likely over the next few months the issues will be resolved but there is always challenges for early adopters.

Essentially both boards have the same amount of PCIe bandwidth, the Carbon can just better spread that bandwidth across multiple slots while almost 90% of the PCIe bandwidth of the F Gaming is eaten up by the primary PCIe 5.0 x16 slot. with "speed" also comes latency to deal with. remember the x16 pcie slot and fastest m.2 slots get their lanes direct from the cpu. But if one wants to be able to hit the ground running with Gen5 M.2 SSDs, without having to wait for improved M.2 cooler solutions and/or without having to rethink the entire rig cooling in use, then there are as mentioned already some motherboards to consider. The Blazing M.2 accommodates the latest PCI Express 5.0 standard to perform twice the bandwidth compared to previous generation, with a breathtaking 128GB/s transfer speed, it is ready to unleash the full potential of future ultrafast SSDs. You also get USB4 support, 10 USB ports on the I/O panel, high quality external audio, two M.2 ports, 2.5 Gbit LAN and WiFi 6E, so it's a super well equipped ITX motherboard, but of course it's not exactly cheap.