ASUS ProArt X870E-CREATOR WiFi AMD AM5 X870E ATX Motherboard PCIe® 5.0 x16 Slots with Full Support for Next-gen GPUs, 16+2+2 Power Stages, DDR5, Dual USB4®, 10 Gb & 2.5 Gb LAN,…

Price paid: 405$
Version: Asus x670e proart creator

Where do I start? I wanted to maximize my use case for this board so I had many expectations to fill.

My use case
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I currently plan on using this board for linux gaming, steam in home game streaming, full stack development, experimenting with homelabbing, development vms (macos / windows / linux), etc.
Future use cases include: a secondary truenas server running along side desktop use, a full blown server, a handbrake server, 3D game development, etc. etc. etc.
Since I am going to be d!icking around a lot, I didn’t want a motherboard that would limit my creativity (pun not intended)

Motherboard goals:
– VFIO for GPU passthrough to VMs – (development, steam streaming)
– Server instances
– Future homelab server
– Longevity: Plan on using this thing for 10 years
– Ego fullfillment

The Market
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From all the research I could gather, my options were: Asus Proart Creator b650, this board, Asrock x670e taichi, MSI Carbon. Focusing on the x670e boards, they all have more or less the same features. Each brand used a small portion of the chipset bandwidth for something else.

– Taichi (~490$): 8 sata ports, 8 usb, 2 thunderbolt, 1 nic (2.5), 2 pcie slots (x16/x0 or x8/x8), optical out, q-code led matrix
– Carbon (~440$): 6 sata ports, 8 usb, NO thunderbolt, 1 nic (2.5), 3 pcie slots (x16/x0/x4 or x8/x8/x4), optical out, q-code led matrix
– Proart (~405$): 4 sata ports, 8 usb, 2 thunderbolt, 2 nic (2.5/10), 3 pcie slots (x16/x0/x2* or x8/x8/x2*), NO optical out, NO q-code led matrix

Of course, there are more nuances, but these were the feature differences that stuck out to me the most. If you want the cheapest VFIO board, get the b650 pro-art. If you want something balls to the walls, the MSI ACE could be a consideration for you. Personally, I did not see a future of emotional fulfillment in either of these boards.

VFIO
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IOMMU groupings can be found on the level1tech forums. Passthrough seems to work for some users. However, the groupings on any board aren’t the most atomic. It is the desire of the community for AMD to release an AGESA update that allows for better IOMMU groupings via a bios option. My understanding is this has occurred on last gen (x570) boards. Please take this into account if you are going to do hardcore VFIO stuff. It is not guaranteed that Asus will even support the newer AGESA options, if it even comes out.

Anyways, I originally bought this motherboard in order to allow for two GPUs to be used at the same time. One GPU would be for my linux host, while the other would be given to a windows vm for gaming, card work, development, etc. But I’ll be honest, I haven’t gotten around to setting this feature up. I mainly wanted a windows vm to allow steam game streaming to occur at the same time as I do development work. But, I found a different solution.

I run steam in gamescope on a separate display (TV). This containerizes games so my usage of the desktop doesn’t interfere with someone else streaming a game (if the person streaming uses a controller, not kbm).

My experience with this board
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So far, everything has mostly run great. I love the quality of the board and aesthetics. The antenna is under-rated too! It looks cool magnetically attached off the back of my hyte y60 case. I haven’t had any issues with drivers on linux (audio, bluetooth, thunderbolt, 2.5gb nic worked great). Also didn’t have any ram issues. Running 6400mhz 2x32gb Teamgroup t-create ram.

Issues I ran into:
– I haven’t actually tested the 10gb nic. Some people claim to have issues with it.
– Couldn’t find the eco mode for my 7900x in the bios. Don’t know if I’m an idiot, or it doesn’t exist.
– No q-code is a joke on this board. I have issues where my gpu will hang the pc on boot. I have no idea why this is happening. My last asus board from 2013 gave a b6 code or something. Why would a mission critical feature like this be missing on a board like this?
– Bios update was looping when I flashed using bios flashback. Kept getting hung updating the thunderbolt firmware. Fixed when I finally unplugged the thunderbolt plug when it did its millionth reboot.
– having 2 more sata ports would have been nice, but the bandwidth is already maxed out.
– Recent Asus controversy was not confidence inspiring.

Conclusion
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Everything has been running rock-solid on Manjaro 22.1.3. Wayland is working fine with my 5700xt. Did notice my monitor struggles to sleep/dim. Also, sleep causes a shutdown sometimes when I have certain apps opening. But yeah, considering the software and hardware is cutting edge, I laid a brick with how smooth everything has been running.

Ultimately it has been hard to not recommend this board. Literally everything works out of the box. Didn’t really have any teething issue either. Absolutely ecstatic and hope that this board last 10+ years like my current, but old, Maximus vi gene. For the central core of my PC, I have great piece of mind that future upgrade-ability will not limit me. Are there other boards out there? Sure. But this seems to be the best bang for the buck on the market.

Bought this board with the intend to run 128GB RAM for AI workload with 2 GPU’s. added an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D only to find out there are no certified 4 DIMM memory solutions for 128GB. The board falls back to its safe setting of 3200 for Memory which is atrocious. Tried different brands but none of them certify a 4 DIMM solution that works. Had to resort to a different board. My son now uses it in a 2 DIMM solutions and it does work great like that.
The 3 stars is for why sell a 4 DIMM board if you can’t use 4 DIMMS reliable.

Have it in my system:
R5 7600
Radeon 7900 xtx hellhound
2x24gb 6000 cl30
2x48gb 5200 CL38
2x8tb 3.5″ HDDs
2×1.92tb SATA SSDs
2×1.92 nvme gen3 SSDs
1x2tb SK hynix platinum p41 gen4 nvme SSD
1x2tb Kingston gen4 nvme SSD
2x500gb crucial gen4 nvme SSDs
4xICUE QX120 fans
2xICUE QX140 fans
3xICUE LX120 fans
3xICUE LX120R fans
Supports all of this, it’s crazy, and I’m going to upgrade to either a 9950x3d or the next gen “10950x3d” if I choose to wait a bit longer.

Good all round board with little or no LED crap. The 10G Ethernet is a huge advantage. AURA support for peripherals and memory is all there. Easy to install and get running for experienced builder. The CPU is fast, the I/O is faster, no twiddling of thumbs, medium size files are just there! I initially thought something was wrong, and they were not actually transferring (move/copy/paste), but they went perfectly with MS x-fer or Teracopy. Not as starkly bare-bones as the ASUS TUF boards.

I used this board to build a machine with AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU, G.Skill Flare X5 64 Gb of 6000 MHz RAM, and KC3000 2Tb SSD to start with. Everything worked out of the box, including CPU and RAM AI overclocking. With a 360 mm AIO, the CPU can boost the cores to 5.85 GHz but I saw all cores compiling a kernel module running at 5.4 GHz. With Linux 22.04, all Ethernet and WiFi modules are recognized and working out of the box.

I chose this to run a two GPU setup; however, that is the only disadvantage of these PCIe Gen 5 board:

The two PCIe Gen 5.0 slots run at 8x in Gen 5 OR also 8x in Gen 4 mode. Despite the fact that the 8x Gen 5 = 16x Gen4 in terms of bandwidth, the GPUs do not get 16x Gen 4 because the bifurcation only splits 16x into two 8x in terms of available physical lines. It does not turn 8x Gen 5 into 16x Gen 4 PCIe slot. Fortunately, for most GPUs, 16x or 8x Gen 4 does not make much difference (1% or so slower for 8x).

Excelente producto

Very nice board, pleasure to assemble. Rock solid so far as expected.. Note ASUS has created a quick release button for the GPU. Almost went crazy removing the graphics card somehow it came out, later I discovered they use a new release button system… Live and learn! LOL