ASUS AMD AM4 Pro WS X570-Ace ATX Workstation Motherboard with 3 PCIe 4.0 X16, Dual Realtek and Intel Gigabit LAN, DDR4 ECC Memory Support, Dual M.2, U.2, and Control Center

Powerful System Base – Supports an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU
I recently completed a build using this board to support an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU. And it is a powerhouse.If one does their homework, one finds that out of the box, the ASUS X570 motherboards do not support the AMD 5 series CPUs. There are a lot of horror stories out there about needing a lesser CPU just to update the firmware. PLEASE! This is NOT the case! Read on for the good news….I had absolutely ZERO issues updating this board with the 5950X installed. It was quite easy, one simply needs to visit the ASUS site and download the most recent firmware for this board ahead if time, and load it to a USB flash drive of some kind (I just used a brand new thumb drive to minimize any possibility of data corruption) as a .CAP file.CAVEAT: Install your CPU WITH COOLER before you power up this board even if the firmware is not yet updated. The CPU will still try to throttle and – with no cooler, could overheat (this board will shut it down in an overheat scenario, but a 5 series chip is a lot of cash to be gambling with). With a CPU cooler installed there should be no need to worry. The board however will not power without a CPU installed.I simply inserted the thumb drive with the most recent .CAP file on it, powered up, used the key to enter the BIOS (F2 works as well) – then followed the instructions in the included manual. The update worked the first time, and this has been – hands down, the most stable build I have done to date. I’ve never before built a system that just came up on the first try with NO issues…(ok, Windows loaded to the wrong drive the first time, so I may have missed a configuration detail in the BIOS – my fix; unplug every drive except the one I want Windows on and re-install…done. Reconnect the other drives – one may need to use a command line series to recover secured sectors on the original “windows” drive…easy to Google. Done. Works perfectly). Honestly, just learn from my mistake: only connect your target drive until Windows is installed. Then the rest is easy peasy.The X570 chipset unlocks more bandwidth on the PCIe Gen 4 lanes. Still, if you plan to use PCIe on the second M.2 memory, then it will have to share bandwidth with anything populated into the PCIe Gen 1 slot. Probably not a big deal, but something to be aware of. I recommend loading your OS onto an M.2 in slot #1 configured for PCIe. I also recommend a PCIe Gen 4 compatible drive for that slot in order to take full advantage. These use an M.2 with an “M” key in case you’re shopping for that as well.This is billed as a workstation board, hence the WS in the name. It is more accurate to describe it as a “workstation lite” board. It has an additional PCIe Gen 4 slot so it will support more horsepower than the usual gaming board, but it still is limited to 128 GB of memory. Don’t get me wrong, that’s still a LOT, but serious workstations for professional engineering and design applications may be more hungry for a 256 GB option. For that however, one is looking at about a 3X price premium over this board (and probably a 2X on the CPU). That said, this board provides a lot of horsepower per dollar. PCIe Gen 4 is a recent standard, and this board has a lot of it. Personally, I’m pretty happy with mine.This board DOES have:- PCIe Gen 4 x 16 in three PCIe Gen 4 slots. It’s PCIe Gen 4 X8 if all three X16 slots are occupied and cross-talking. But if those are all GPUs, then you would effectively have 3 GPUs sharing an X24 lane superhighway. So if running CAD files or similar is your thing and you somehow managed to find 3 up to date GPUs in a blockchain dominated market, make sure you get a desk chair with seatbelts to go with that :-)- Two M.2 slots that will work on either PCIe Gen 4 or SATA. Conceivably this would also support a dual OS setup with a startup choice. I personally haven’t tried that, though.- 4 SATA 3 connections.- 2 U.2 connections which can be configured as an additional 4 (total) SATAs.- Plenty of USB 3 connections as a mix of 3.1 and 3.2. There is only one native USB C however.- Very Stable DC delivery, good component monitoring, and a plethora of over-clocking options.- I have to admit, REALLY good sound built in.- Robust heat sinks throughout.- Really stable BIOS and native software for configuration. CAVEAT: If you’re a power tweaker this board has just about every option. But if you’re a power tweaker wanna-be, this board can help you spend a ton of cash. So please know what you’re doing of you access that part of the BIOS – the BIOS doesn’t have a lot of protection for those who do not. It does however have a lot of assisted options to get one with lesser knowledge where they want to be, tuning wise. (Already screw up? There IS a factory reset option for the BIOS, but it won’t bring back any damaged components).This board does NOT:- Have a front facing USB C connection. if you have a case with a front USB C (generally understood to be a 3.2), then you’ll need an adapter to use it, and it may cost you a PCIe slot to do it. One can use a USB C adapter to connect the front lead to one of the board’s USB 3.0 slots and then the port will function, but then it won’t be a true USB C.- Have any native RGB control such as AURA. If you want the light show you’ll need a third-party driver. These often come with fan kits etc. “But wait, you have LED lighting in your picture!”…oh, you saw that…I used a Phanteks case that happened to come with its own LED driver, and I put in a third party LED signal distribution block (pay attention to native voltage if you do this). Originally I was going to dispense with LED altogether, but since that feature came with the case anyway…. So, that is one option if you want LED lighting with a motherboard that doesn’t support it.- Have any Thunderbolt connections. The ASUS B550 ProArt Creator does – as of this writing it is the ONLY motherboard I know of with Thunderbolt 4 (for this build I looked at a LOT of boards). But it also uses the 550 chipset – not a bad set, but lacks PCIe bandwidth that X570 provides. So you may need to make a choice (like I did) between more workstation type features or Thunderbolt 4. In the end I decided I needed the higher motherboard more. You of course have your own needs and work methods to consider.- Have any WiFi or Bluetooth built in. There are really good options for cards that plug into the PCIe 1 slot – but that will require the M.2_2 to share bandwidth – so plan with that in mind. If one only cares about Bluetooth, one can just use a USB Bluetooth adapter- about the size of a shirt button and perhaps about $15.- Support simultaneous use of SATA on all the SATA ports AND the M.2s should one choose to use the M.2 ports in SATA. In fact, I don‘t know of a motherboard on planet Earth that will. Just be aware of this for the configuration you are planning in your head – save yourself aggravation down the road with this knowledge.- Have 10 Gigabyte internet interface. Some boards do, but not this one. Most of the time that won’t really matter because even if you have a 10 Gig switch in your house, you probably don’t have that bandwidth once it goes outside your walls. If you are looking at this as a workplace option, that could be a factor. 10 Gig is available on a card, but….you guessed it… costs you a slot. Just be aware. All of that said, the two 2.5 Gig ports are pretty robust for most uses. 10 Gig only really matters if one needs to send engineering, CAD, Survey-grade Imagery data etc. over the internet or intranet. If you want it for gaming, one may consider a gaming board with that feature.Would I buy it again? Absolutely. In fact I kind of did – the first one had evidence of tampering in the box. Amazon was really great about exchanging it. But otherwise, I just don’t build systems every day. But as a low-cost option for workstation-like functionality, this board is a really good choice. It doesn’t appear that ASUS is looking to upgrade any of the above “doesn’t have…” anytime soon. Ideally, I’d love to see the child product that would come from marrying this board to the B550 Creator (so long as the X570 gene is the dominant one)…. With a worldwide chip shortage in play, I’m not holding my breath for a lot of new products this year. This board however did facilitate a pretty robust media creation system at a reasonable budget. I see lesser systems for sale right now, using lesser boards, at $2K over what it cost me to build on this board – and I maxed out the DRAM. All told, this board provided a straight forward build, straight forward initial power up, and a system in full service the same day…it really doesn’t get much better.

problematic
This motherboard has been problematic for me. I was using this for several months. Its performance is good. However, I’ve encountered several of the problems that you will find with the board if you do a web search. Bios upgrades, red led, and after a recent power-supply replacement, its failing to permit boot up again even after i’ve taken all the actions found on the web to remedy the problem.

I’ve had problems with the d.o.c.p.
I’m a computer programmer. I need 128GB RAM because I must work with several VMs of an ERP system that gobble up resources like crazy. So I paired up this motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and two corsair 64GB kits of 3200Mhz DDR4 memory (CMK64GX4M2E3200C16 – these are not on the QVL). when I enable the DOCP the motherboard turns off at random times. I don’t know if it’s the memory or the mainboard. When I run the memory at 2133Mhz everything seems to be stable, albeit slower. Apart from that (which I hope has a fix) and the graphics card sitting on top of a mainboard fan it seems to be a good motherboard.

I’ve been using this for the past few months as a server, running Unraid. I find that it works quite well but there are a few quirks and things you need to be aware of.SATA ConnectionsThere are only 4 SATA ports on the board, however there is a U.2 port where you can buy a cable that splits into 4 additional SATA connectors. I was successfully able to use that to provide 8 total SATA ports (you need to enable the U.2 port in BIOS and have it set to SATA mode). With the addition of a Dell H310 I am now sitting at a total of 16 spinning disks. This is great for Unraid.X570 ChipsetA couple of things to be aware of with X570. There is an active fan on the chipset. These fans can and do fail. Also, X570 does not seem to be fully supported in Unraid. I was not able to get motherboard stats monitored/integrated, due to some driver issues that have still not been updated in the latest versions of Unraid. So be aware you will not be able to see Fan speeds, MB temps, things like that. Lookup nct6775 X570 driver issues for more info. A lot of the protections you will need to setup in the BIOS.MemoryThis board does support ECC RAM but only unbuffered so there are not many options available, and finding it is VERY difficult. I ended up buying a USED set of Kingston 32GB (KSM32ED8/32ME). It passed MEMTEST and shows ECC enabled so that’s good enough for me. I strongly recommend to only purchase ECC RAM that’s on the ASUS QVL sheet.CPU TemperatureThis board, combined with a Ryzen 5800X created a LOT of heat. I noticed on the first day of testing that just minor loads will crank the temperatures up to 95*C. Thinking I made a mistake, I reset the heatsink with new thermal paste at least 4 times. Upgraded the fan, didn’t make a difference. It turns out this is caused by the PBO feature, or CPU Precision Boost Overdrive. This is a feature in X570 and Ryzen you need to read up on it. By default Asus has set this board for a thermal throttling limit of 95*Celcius. I did not like how hot this would get so I lowered it to 75*C. You could disable this altogether but many forums advised that this is a core feature of Ryzen and would defeat the purpose of buying it. Just be aware of this feature when you start to see very spikey temperature graphs.Remote Admin (ACCE)This feature is there, but doesn’t work the best. You essentially enable the feature in the BIOS, setup DHCP and connect the 2nd port to your switch/router. Keep in mind that you only have 2 network ports on this board and if you enable this feature you are down to only one. You download the software onto another PC to act as a “controller”. You could then connect to this board and perform power off/restart functions. It doesn’t even show current stats like CPU Temps/Fan speeds, etc. It will only show the stats of these things during the bootup phase of the host. Not particularly useful. So you can essentially reboot the host remotely from another host with ACCE software and that’s pretty much it. Also, make sure to disable the remote admin network port inside Unraid or your OS. Everything’s controlled in the BIOS so if you try to use the port from the OS it will cause some conflicts.BIOSThe BIOS is VERY feature rich and there are thousands of settings, many of which I don’t understand. Documentation is not that great. The user manual just repeats what is shown on the BIOS screen, and doesn’t give any additional details. Don’t forget to update it, mine came with 1+ yr old BIOS firmware on it.Power UsageIt is fairly power efficient which is one of the reasons I went to AMD/Ryzen. With 16 drives spinning and one GPU card I average around 170 Watts. Occasionally I will spike to 230Watts usage. I may have bought too big of a PSU (850W). But I haven’t messed around with multiple GPU cards yet.FinallyDon’t expect this to be the best server board, or even server-grade hardware. I wouldn’t run this in a data center. If you are looking for that I might recommend SuperMicro or Asrock Rack. If you are a home or small business user wanting to setup an Unraid server this might make a good option for you.Overall I’m happy with the purchase and once I got the bugs ironed out and the features more understood it’s been running decent.

First thing is warranty issue when not buying mobo straight from SG distributor. Decided to jump after considering the price difference for CPU+mobo combo.So far so good. Updated to latest BIOS and working perfectly.The 8x8x8 PCIE-lane is the biggest draw for my needs. Also the use of U.2 for NVME/SATA mode is a nice change.Quite big upgrade from Sandy Bridge i7-2600k from 8 to 16 threads CPU 3700X. There is possibility to upgrade to 32 threads in future with 3950X/4950X??.Hope to last me till DDR5/PCIE6 era coming – :).

Not as reliable. HDMI wasnt working, Mother board shuts off when I use three TITAN RTX for rendering. PC boots up fine, but the moment i hit render, the entire system just shuts off. PSU not the issue, tested on another motherboard with same cards, was fine. Using two cards with this board worked fine. I expected this to have better performance as it claims its workstation quality.