MSI X570 MEG ACE - My likes/dislikes/review

[Golden Dragoon]

I purchased my MSI MEG X570 Ace about a month ago, and rather than posting my first impressions (which were fairly positive) I though I would use it for a while to give a proper review, so after using it for a while I want to list the things I like and the things I don’t like:

Likes:
Aesthetics – This is a very good-looking motherboard, the dark bronze\gold and black theme it has is understated and is much better than the in your face design choices other manufactures have used. The subtle RGB “infinity mirror” covering the rear I/O fits nicely without being over the top.
https://gyazo.com/e994d468e2831807748a54fa2534ec19

3 M.2 slots – Having 3 M.2 slots on a standard ATX board is impressive, though they have had to make a couple of sacrifices to fit them on. There are 3 rather than 4 PCI-E 16X slots and only 4 SATA ports to allow them to fit in all these M.2. Having 4 16X PCI-E slots isn’t a deal breaker though as rarely do people use more than two graphics cards these days and I would argue that an additional M.2 would suit more people than an additional 16X slot.

Chipset cooling – This was a big worry for me getting a X570 board, chipset fans are small and fairly high speed and can cause an annoying whine that most cases won’t completely block out. However, MSI thought of this and have connected the chipset heatsink to the VRM heatsinks with a heatpipe. The result of this is that in all my testing the chipset fan has either never turned on, or if it has it has been at such a slow speed that I haven’t noticed it at all. Manually turning it on it becomes rather noticeable at 50-60% of it’s maximum speed, and has the aforementioned annoying whine, but as it never seems to come on, this is a rather moot point.

2.5gb and 1gb LAN onboard – This is great, I have been able to connect my NAS machine with 2.5gb support directly to this machine in addition to the network using it’s other port, and also connect to my router via the 1gb LAN port and thankfully Windows seems to always use the 2.5gb connection when accessing files from it whilst other things are able to use the 1gb connection.

VRM design - I am particularly impressed by the VRM design, MSI are using the IR35201 which is a well-regarded 6+2 design voltage regulator, feeding 6 IR3599 doublers to split the PWM signal into 12 IR3555 power stages, each of these power stages are rated at 60 amps giving the board a maximum theoretical rating of 720 amps, this is well in excess of what anyone will be pushing this board to in normal usage and as a result the VRMs are kept nice and cool by running them significantly under their maximum rating.

WiFi antenna design – I don’t use WiFi on my desktop, but the inclusion of a WiFi antenna that isn’t just a small afterthought is a fantastic inclusion, whilst I haven’t used it on this motherboard I have attached it to another device where I do use WiFi and the signal integrity improved and I saw a boost in speed of ~30% over using the standard “rabbit ears” type of antenna that were previously used.

Board Explorer view in BIOS – This is an amazing feature, there is an option in the bios that takes you to an image of the board where you can hover over each area with your mouse and see what is currently plugged into it and the details of the device. This saved me a large amount of time troubleshooting when I set things up for the first time as I was able to see exactly what was plugged in, and that I hadn’t seated 1 of my sticks of RAM correctly at a glance.
Rear I/O – I really appreciate the large number of USB 3 ports on the rear I/O, there are 3 x USB 3.1 G2, 1 x USB 3.1 G2 Type-C, 2 x USB 3.1 G1 and 2 x USB 2.0, that is plenty for my needs and the inclusion of the Type C port at the rear and another Type C header for front panel connections is a very welcome inclusion. It also has the fairly standard 5 3.5mm audio jack outputs along with a SPDIF optical output that should cover most people needs nicely along with a very useful BIOS reset button and a BIOS flashing button that I believe allows updating the BIOS with no CPU installed.


Dislikes:
4 SATA ports – This is a slight disappointment, I came from a board with 8 SATA ports, and the flexibility this allowed was welcome. I understand that due to PCI-E lane restrictions of having 3 M.2 slots that there is only enough left for 4 ports, but other manufacturers have allowed 6-8 ports and disable anything over the first 4 if 3 M.2 devices are used, that may have been a more preferable solution if you required more SATA.

Pump PWM header – This is no doubt a bug that will be fixed in future BIOS updates, but as of BIOS version 7C35v13 and MSI’s Dragon center software version 1.0.25.0 the pump fan seems to forget its smart fan\PWM settings upon the computer waking from sleep. This is a minor annoyance that takes a few seconds to fix by opening the dragon software and hitting apply and not everyone will actually be using all of the fan headers on the board so you can just avoid the pump fan header until this is fixed in an update.

Overall I would highly recommend this motherboard, the particular highlights are the low noise of the chipset fan that rarely spins up due to the heatpipe linking it to the VRM and efficient VRM design and the 3 M.2 slots. Performance of everything as a whole has been spectacular, I upgraded from a highly overclocked Phenom II X6 to this board and a Ryzen 3700X adding 2 M.2 drives for windows/games and the speed of everything has been night and day in comparison.

I was previously fairly heavily bottlenecking my graphics card, using my old card (GTX 970) I saw an almost doubling of framerates in the majority of games I play and adding in the Vega 56 card I bought alongside this has seen my performance increase even further allowing me to up the settings to max on everything at 1440p.

Overclocking has been my only slight disappointment; I have not been able to go into this in great depth and am not totally confident in my abilities overclocking Ryzen as things have moved on since the Phenom days. I have so far not been able to nail down any settings that are able to beat the precision boost overdrive that the processor is able to use automatically, this isn’t a big issue for me as I know the issue is in my knowledge gap rather than any inherent BIOS or motherboard issues due to many people being able to overclock this board/processor combo to quite high levels completely stably.

https://gyazo.com/065b3f032320c1a89d74d4d6d7bdb440

[ik9000]

Nice, thanks for taking the time to do this. As a community we should do more of this - feedback on purchases, new kit etc. I will do the same once I've built my new machine

Out of interest have you tried putting win7 on it as an exercise of whether it can be got to run (even if not intending to run it long term)?

Would be interested in hearing how it goes as currently weighing up either an MSI x570 or Asus x470 for my Ryzen 9 build. Currently leaning towards the latter but only to ensure I can get win7 working.

[ik9000]

Overclocking has been my only slight disappointment; I have not been able to go into this in great depth and am not totally confident in my abilities overclocking Ryzen as things have moved on since the Phenom days. I have so far not been able to nail down any settings that are able to beat the precision boost overdrive that the processor is able to use automatically, this isn’t a big issue for me as I know the issue is in my knowledge gap rather than any inherent BIOS or motherboard issues due to many people being able to overclock this board/processor combo to quite high levels completely stably.

Overclocking headroom is not that great on ryzen chips - the system is essential overclocking them on the fly to get the optimum performance out of them for the available cooling system. The usual sililcon lottery also applies (see here) and the vast majority of people will have a 3700x chip that barely hits 4.1GHz, some won't even reach that. Only a lucky few will hit 4.15GHz, none of the chips tested by that site hit 4.2GHz.

[Golden Dragoon]

Nice, thanks for taking the time to do this. As a community we should do more of this - feedback on purchases, new kit etc. I will do the same once I've built my new machine

Out of interest have you tried putting win7 on it as an exercise of whether it can be got to run (even if not intending to run it long term)?

Would be interested in hearing how it goes as currently weighing up either an MSI x570 or Asus x470 for my Ryzen 9 build. Currently leaning towards the latter but only to ensure I can get win7 working.

I haven't tried Win 7, I transfered my licence for that to a Win 10 one when they allowed that so I'm not sure if I could even install it now. Is there a compelling reason for you to stick with Win 7? Win 10 with the Microsoft spying disabled is a pretty good OS and in many ways is better than 7.

Overclocking headroom is not that great on ryzen chips - the system is essential overclocking them on the fly to get the optimum performance out of them for the available cooling system. The usual sililcon lottery also applies (see here) and the vast majority of people will have a 3700x chip that barely hits 4.1GHz, some won't even reach that. Only a lucky few will hit 4.15GHz, none of the chips tested by that site hit 4.2GHz.

I know that the OC headroom isn't great, but I should be able to get 4ghz all core but am struggling with the number of options available. Got it to 3.9ghz all core, but for most things allowing it to OC itself with precision boost seems to get me better performance.

[ik9000]

I haven't tried Win 7, I transfered my licence for that to a Win 10 one when they allowed that so I'm not sure if I could even install it now. Is there a compelling reason for you to stick with Win 7? Win 10 with the Microsoft spying disabled is a pretty good OS and in many ways is better than 7.



I know that the OC headroom isn't great, but I should be able to get 4ghz all core but am struggling with the number of options available. Got it to 3.9ghz all core, but for most things allowing it to OC itself with precision boost seems to get me better performance.

I do a lot of sound recording and the hassle of getting the drivers fixed each time MS decides it wants to "improve" my system on win10 is driving me insane. Low latency matters, and that means I value control over everything running on the system. New features, bloatware and the incessant background polling MS introduced with win10 all suck. That's quite aside from the built-in spyware.

Don't get me wrong, I will run 10 too (on a separate drive) for photoshop if nothing else, but my sound editing software is all win7 perpetual licence, no internet needed, and I'm keen to keep it as long as posisble.