Review: ASUS ROG Strix X470-I Gaming (Mini-ITX) - Small is the new Sexy

LED lights....

excuse me while i go heat up some needles so i can poke my eyes out.

 

Thanks for this review Hilbert! Ever since the release of Ryzen been looking to go mini-ITX factor. Time to make a coffee and 'work'.

@Hilbert Hagedoorn: on your conclusion page you mention 'You can mount a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti on there if you wanted too, as well as two super fast NVMe M2 SSDs.' doesnt that mean however, you would need to push the GPU back to x4 mode? How much would this impact gaming performance..?

 

That right small is now new sexy! From now on Im building only mini-ITX PC's as they can be as powerful as bigger brothers. Plus the case can be squeezed almost anywhere.

 

Asus seems to have made a lot of odd priorities for this board:
1. The layout it weird, especially the SATA ports.
2. There was definitely room to have 6 audio jacks, but they only fit 3. They could've at least provided a connector for SPDIF.
3. I understand B450 chipsets aren't available yet, but X470 seems overkill.
4. Only 1 HDMI port? There was room for another display connector.
5. No USB type C?
There are boards with half the price that have more/better features than this.

 

I would love to have seen this build in a Mini-ITX case with thermals.

 

And once again, another worthless motherboard review at Guru3D. Considering the fact that I have been following the website for a very long time, I feel ashamed to recommend any of its motherboard reviews to anybody.

 

Y'know... complaints are effectively useless when you don't at the very least explain what's wrong and why. Bemoaning about the articles as though they're always bad without stating any reason is not going to fix anything. In my experience, Hilbert is very willing to adjust, if you're polite and state something useful in your criticisms.

 

Ok, you are one of the few forum members that I actually respect a lot and I was expecting you or some other forum members to reply. Now, the article. Tell me, how do you review a motherboard when all you are doing is comparing the motherboard being reviewed with 20 different processors on other platforms. A motherboard review is a review when it is compared to boards in the same socket and different generations or with boards of other vendors with same/different chipsets. Just taking tests with a processor and throwing it in a chart with a i7-8700K and a Pentium G4560 and a Ryzen 5 1600 and Threadripper and Skylake-X is pointless and useless. How do I make a decision as to which motherboard to buy from the X470 platform? Opening all the reviews of the different X470 boards in different tabs? Why do I need to compare processors from the 3rd gen Core series and the FX series in a goddamn motherboard review of a 2018 platform? Wouldn't it be more USEFUL if AM4 socket boards were pitched against each other following a standard methodology to test how they fare with a single CPU sample being used for all of them and the same cooler(okay that might change according to heat generated)? IMO the only pages where anything fresh and original is found is the 1st page to the last photograph page, the OC page for that CPU-Z screenshot and the last paragraph of the conclusion page. Everything else is pointless.

 

Hilbert puts so much into his reviews and makes a point of reading the comments section, very often responding to sensible ideas.

Kinda leaves your comment feeling rather empty... and rather mean considering the huge amount of effort he puts into Guru3D.



@schmidtbag
SPDIF seems great for stereo and some people's amplifiers, but it does not have the bandwidth for HD surround sound. Are they ever planning any updates for it?

( I was forced into SPDIF by my MSI laptop which went out of it's way to disable surround sound channels via HDMI, many people have this issue with various models of MSI gaming laptops. The Latest Win10 17134.1 build fixed HDMI surround audio over HDMI on my laptop btw for anyone interested )

 

Nothing against how much he puts into the website. I have been following him and the website for literally my entire life. Reading the comments section has nothing to do with what I criticized the review for and I appreciate that he is among the very few reviewers and moderators who do so. I am sorry if my comment hurt you or made you feel it was mean. This was something genuine and considering you had no logical responses to any of the points I made other than "feeling empty", I think somewhere in the back of your mind, you agreed to my thoughts. I love Hilbert's work and its this concern which made me comment today. Had I been not bothered, I wouldn't have commented at all.

 

Valid point, but there are 2 things to consider:
1. It's still good to know where the performance stands relative to other competing platforms.
2. There aren't enough 400 series chipsets or motherboards available to test. I get the impression Guru3D doesn't buy any of the motherboards they test.
That being said, I do agree comparing the performance to 300 series chipsets would be a [more] useful benchmark.

I understand what you're asking, but keep in mind Hilbert focuses on more of an objective standpoint, whereas what you're asking here is subjective. Seeing as the CPU and RAM clock-per-clock performance is within 1% of each other between each motherboard, there are only the following reasons to care about what board you get:
1. How well it can overclock.
2. Features that you are seeking, such as BIOS related or available connectors.
3. Misc and obvious things, like dimensions, color scheme, board layout, CPU socket, etc.
4. Price point.
5. Customer support.
These are things that are specific to your build. If a product doesn't meet your checklist, it isn't worth getting. If multiple products meet all of your criteria, get the cheapest one.
So - what is there left for someone like Hilbert to review? To me, that answer comes down to quality, performance, and value. These are things that the average person can't know just by reading a spec sheet. These are what he tests. Does that make more sense?

In my experience, SPDIF's surround sound is plenty good enough. To my knowledge, it operates at 192Kbps. That's low enough that with good headphones I'm sure most people could tell the difference vs 384Kbps, but, for the average surround speaker system in a typical livingroom at a reasonable volume, you'd have a hard time noticing the quality loss. If you're an audiophile with a 5.1 or 7.1 surround system, I would advise against SPDIF.

To my knowledge, the platform is largely dead in the water. It's mostly been obsolete by either USB or HDMI.

 

Hey, so I'll chime in too since I was really looking forward to a review of this board. Here's what I posted on the sff and amd subreddit about this article:


This review doesn't seem to be very thorough or professional. There's a few glaring mistakes or lack of scrutiny in certain parts. He asks the reader to count the phases (6), but didn't bother to remove the heatsink to see if it's a true 6 phase or another combination (it probably is, but I didn't learn any more about power delivery than when I looked at the picture of the board a few weeks ago).

Also, he states there are 2 SATA ports when there are clearly 4 on the board (The BIOS lists 4 as well, shown later in the review). The board even comes with 4 SATA cables, so this is a very obvious mistake.

His overview of overclocking on the board gives no information.

There's a lot of information here but very little of it is relevant to what I was hoping to see.

In retrospect I was a little mean about the way my response was handled, and I'm going to preemptively apologize for the way I worded my above post. In my opinion, the things a review should look for are overclocking capabilities, and features. There's a lot of fluff in this article. 29 pages hardly seems necessary.

I appreciate the work that went into this article, and he did show some good things like the BIOS layout (which looks great per usual, Asus) and a more in-depth look at the hardware, but I was really hoping to see an in-depth look into overclocking on this board. Comparing how the same chip overclocks on this board vs other boards (do you need to add more voltage to compensate for v droop? How does the VRM temperature hold up in longer heavy loads?) would be helpful in future reviews.

This is what I was really looking for in this review today, and came away 29 pages later with no answers to the real questions I had about this board.

 

I plan to upgrade on Ryzen 2. I am really temped to go ITX now.
My 1700x going to become my productivity machine, and my 4970k going to me nephew.

 

Depending on your budget and what you already have on-hand, you might be able to get started sooner than you think. You could temporarily use a mATX or ATX case until you can afford a new one, and if you get a Ryzen with a box cooler, that ought to hold you over just fine until you can afford a new/better one - the stock heatsinks are surprisingly effective and quiet. That being said, if you hold off OCing just a little bit, you could probably use some crappy 300W PSU from a junked Dell to hold you over. So that just leaves you needing to buy the mobo and CPU (I'm guessing you already have RAM? You didn't mention that).

 

Pointless, the CPU review exist for that.

More than enough 400 series reviews exists on this website. I don't ask him to do something that's not available. He has already done those reviews. Just post their numbers in a table and make an article.

You destroy your own standpoint with the sentence you wrote after this. And like I said, everything that you state above is available on Pages 1 to 6, 28 and 29. What Hilbert has to give is his opinion on how the boards stack up against each other. He is the Don here. We don't want numbers about Intel and AMD processors in an Asus motherboard review. We want to know how it compares to other boards from the competitors, how the VRMs handle the heat, how well it overclocks, how much voltage he needed, memory support and stuff IN HIS OWN WORDS because we trust him, not a article written as if like a bot with 20 or so worthless pages of same stuff being repeated every year.

Finally, somebody who understands. IMO the best motherboard reviews come from OC3D's Tiny Tom Logan, BitTech.net and AnandTech(though they are complete Intel suckers, I mean who does 15 X299 reviews over a year and just 6 AM4 reviews with boards that no one buys and also being reviewed at least 6-7 months after launch, half of them being done last month only). There are countless otherswho do good reviews but sadly, the person I want has 29 pages of worthless tables.