The primary sacrifice compared to pricier boards is that the second x16-length slot has only four lanes, because the top x16 slot can’t share its lanes. And if you don’t want to pay for the WiFi, ASRock offers an otherwise-identical X570 Steel Legend without that controller for $10 less. The rest of this $200 board includes solid basics such as its 10x50A CPU voltage regulator. The primary added features it delivers beyond what’s offered by the X570 chipset are the 2.4Gb/s Wi-Fi controller, some onboard lighting, and some extra RGB headers. Though it’s not ideal for some of the fancier graphics and storage options of the high-end market, the X570 Steel Legend offers Ryzen 3000 buyers great stability and efficiency at a reasonable price. Fixed x16/x4 pathways on the two long PCIe slots -One-piece M.2/PCH cover And for more general tips about what to look for when buying a motherboard, check out our motherboard buying guide, as well as the eight motherboard features you probably don’t need. So choose wisely based on your storage speed needs-or desires.įor more on the X570 chipset, see our X570 explainer from back when the chipset launched in 2019. But for gaming and many other common tasks, you won’t likely notice the speed difference between a faster drive and a good PCIe 3.0 NVMe model. And with PCIe 4.0 support, the best SSD for X570 is undoubtedly a PCIe 4.0 drive. So you’ll also want to pair one of the best X570 motherboards with some of the best RAM you can buy. We noted in our Ryzen 5000 RAM Guide that the sweet spot for memory performance on X570 is DDR 3600. So be sure to double-check CPU compatibility closely with whatever board you’re considering before buying. But as AM4 CPUs have accumulated, we’ve seen plenty of compatibility issues between CPU and motherboard generations. If you don’t plan on adding a super-speedy SSD or a high-end next-gen graphics card ( which you still can't really find at prices anywhere close to reasonable now anyway), in most cases you can certainly get by with an older X470 motherboard. If you don’t need lots of speedy lanes for multi-GPU setups or several of the best SSDs, you may want to consider one of the best B550 motherboards instead. Higher prices are still the real sticking point with the best X570 motherboards, although Intel's Z590 motherboards are also pricier than their predecessors as well. At this point even if you opt for an X570 board, you won’t likely notice the noise of these small fans over other components in your case, unless perhaps you opt for something extremely quiet, like Noctua's Colossal NH-P1 passive cooler and a zero-RPM graphics card. All that said, after some initial worries about fan noise on early boards, companies have tweaked their BIOS settings. The latter means almost all the best X570 motherboards will have built-in fans to cool the chipset, unless you opt for one of the new X570S chipset models, which do away with the fan.