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  • cosmotic - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link

    Why 4 nvme slots? I feel like those pcie lanes would be best sent to the pcie slots...
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link

    If you only want 2 NVMe drives, the 4th PCIe slot is x8. Best of both worlds.
  • andrehe - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    It would be better to offer three M.2 slots, and have two PCIe x4 slots: one for Thunderbolt, one for 10 Gbit/s Ethernet. Still, a sound card can be used in the x1 slot which is a good thing, the Gigabyte X570S Aorus Master lacks such a slot.

    But I have ECC UDIMMs from Kingston and thus will not buy a consumer platform from MSI because it is the only manufacturer not supporting ECC operation. This has been confirmed with MSI support.

    I do not understand MSI because they could offer the Unify and especially Unify-X for overclockers, and the Ace Max for people who prefer stability (for applications or competitive online games/e-sport) - with ECC support.

    Asus and Asrock need to finalize their offers. I am curious about it and will wait until the full range of X570S boards are released.

    I want to use:
    - 2 PCIe 3.0x4 SSDs
    - 2 ECC DDR4 UDIMMs
    - Thunderbolt (no hurry)
    - 10 GBit/s Ethernet (no hurry)
    - a PCIe x1 sound card, at least Toslink (optical out) - what can be used from onboard audio
    - 1 SATA HDD for backup
    - 1 SATA BD drive for grabbing my music collection
  • TeXWiller - Friday, August 20, 2021 - link

    I've also been a little puzzled with MSI policy with the ECC memory, particularly since their products are often not on the cheaper side either. I'm fine using them in an APU build without the ECC support and no need to run long jobs, but for the systems that have 4 DIMMs and stay up processing for days, I'm a little hesitant.
    Meanwhile, some of the IO-options are just wasted on me as I need 8 SATA ports and have a quality USB audio solution. Additional 4 SATA ports in a card adds about $60-70 worth of local currency to the price of a motherboard that has only 4 ports, for example.
  • Alexvrb - Saturday, August 21, 2021 - link

    You're an edgecase. You already use a "quality" external USB audio solution and you want a crapload of SATA ports. You want some RS-232 serial ports too, I suppose? Jokes aside, I'm sure there's a motherboard that meets your needs, but you're definitely not the target audience for this one.
  • damianrobertjones - Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - link

    For the people that want to go absolutely crazy with storage. Or, of course, video editors.
    -System M.2
    -Work M.2
    -Scratch M.2 / Proxy
    -Export m.2

    Or raid.
  • ballsystemlord - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link

    I'm looking at 8 SATA ports (Which will require +4 PCIe lanes according to the chipset block diagram), 16 lanes of M.2 PCIe slots, and (an admitted in the article), 21 lanes for the PCIe slots.
    The Ryzen CPU has only 20+4 lanes total. The chipset has only 4 SATA ports. It also has only 16 PCIe lanes.

    This leaves them with -5 PCIe lanes.

    I hope they installed a PCIe splitter because otherwise most of what's on this board will be disabled HW.
  • Arnham - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link

    https://download.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/mb/E7D50v...

    Manual is available for this board. Look on pages 35 and 36.

    From manual:
    "PCI_E4, M2_3, M2_4 and SATA5~8 share the same bandwidth."
    There is a bandwidth sharing table that details this as a matrix, it looks like you can configure PCIE_E4 for example to be X4 or X8 which changes what is available to the other shared ports

    You can also find a nice block diagram of exactly how everything is attached on page 26. They've only got 2 of the PCIE ports and 1 of the M.2 ports connected directly to the CPU PCIE lanes.
  • Arnham - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link

    I kind of like this setup actually --- yes, you have a limited amount of PCIE lanes, but you can pick where you need to use them. It does lead to a fair amount of disabled interfaces with some configurations as you correctly note -- but the flexibility is useful.
  • willis936 - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link

    So close to a real winner. It's just missing 10G.
  • shabby - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    Blame intel for keeping us on 1gbps for this long.
  • dontlistentome - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    Other network vendors are available. If they'd made 2.5G/5G/whatever for a reasonable price we'd all be on it by now. They didn't, so we're not.
    Copper 10G sucks power. Still irrelevent for 99% of users who don't use a NAS and aren't on multi-gig internet.
  • willis936 - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    99% of users aren't going to pay more than 500 USD for a motherboard. For the 1% of users that will: the motherboard better have 10G if they expect me to give them my cash.
  • ballsystemlord - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    They lack enough PCIe bandwidth for 10G.
  • Silver5urfer - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link

    This Mobo has 8x SATA which is a win in my book and good spec sheet, but the real deal is if these mobos exhibit the USB issues or not. Wifi and BT also seems to have some issues on some boards. If these also show the same problems then it's 100% Ryzen 5000 issue and I will move to Intel for my purchase.
  • coburn_c - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link

    Friends don't let friends buy MSI. Also if you are this late to the game don't spend this much on x570. I'm really hoping for 32 pcie lanes from the next socket.
  • sonny73n - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    I'm not your friend so I buy MSI and you can wait about 60 years then you'll have 1024 PCIe lanes which will be better than 32.
  • RaistlinZ - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    My MSI Z490 Unify has been fantastic. Sorry if you've had a bad experience with them.
  • Shmee - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    Looks like a solid board, though I agree an onboard 10G ethernet port would be great, so one does not have to use a PCIe x4 NIC. I have its predecessor, the X570 Meg Ace, and I am happy with it.
  • ZoZo - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    Right, at some point someone's going to have to tell MSI to drop their stupid dragon
  • Exotica - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    No thunderbolt. Or usb4. Eww.
  • Leeea - Thursday, August 19, 2021 - link

    I like the back panel layout with all the normal USB ports. So handy to have.
  • Tomatotech - Friday, September 10, 2021 - link

    Indeed. I was so pleased when I got a mobo with all USB3 / USBC ports. Finally no more crappy USB2 ports, no need to peer at the back of my case and worry about where to plug my USB devices.

    Then I discovered I have some USB2 stuff (wireless dongles) that DO NOT WORK when plugged into USB3 ports. Something to do with USB3 frequencies interfering with the wireless radios. I had to frankenstein a USB2 header cable connected to one of the motherboard internal USB headers and leave it hanging out of one of the case's card slots, like an exposed dangling flaccid willy.
  • Oxford Guy - Friday, August 20, 2021 - link

    ‘a large 18-phase power delivery with premium 90 A power stages’

    Which CPU requires this?

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