Asus PRIME X570

Great overall motherboard

I got this one as it was highly recommended. 3 PCIe 16x slots means a lot of room to upgrade, onboard M.2 ports, one is directly connected to motherboard. I got a Sabrent rocket M.2 with 5,000 mb/sec read in that slot and tested it, verified capable of up to 5,000 mb/sec. A word of advice if using the top M.2 port with a large graphic card, the M.2 heat sink may not fit. Sabrent heat sink and Sapphire pulse 5700 xt had just under 2mm of clearance which was a little close. Motherboard did not come with heat sink cover for top M.2 port and you will need one for high performance M.2 card to avoid overheating and throttling. Bottom M.2 port has a long metal plate with pre-applied thermal strips for second M.2 drive. Bottom M.2 port is not directly connected to CPU but is routed through x570 controller and it is not quite as fast as top M.2 port. Top M.2 port + blazing fast M.2 drive + Ryzen 3 for PCIe 4.0 support gets to Windows 10 from power on in about 20 seconds. UEFI menu takes some getting used to if you haven't accessed any new motherboard in the past few years. The EZ mode comes up by default but can switch to Advanced if you prefer and there is a lot of option within the menu such as setting PCIe bandwidth (16x, 8x, etc), onboard SATA mode (including hot swap enable/disable), as well as overclocking. Be mindful when installing DDR4 memory, it defaults to 2133 (pretty much all DDR4 capable motherboard) since it is not set to auto load XMP profile for higher speed. You will have to adjust it manually to get true speed out of DDR4 memory. If there was any gripe I had, it's the razor sharp edge around the slots of the heat sink shroud over CPU power chips and over rear IO ports 2 weeks after this, a huge wound on my knuckle still hasn't completely healed over. So when installing CPU and CPU heat sink, mind your fingers.

Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: refurbished | Sold by: computer-hq