Reviews MSI Prestige X570 Creation Review

Man, MSI sure know how to make an ugly motherboard...

 

That seems to be a bit of a trend with X570 boards tbh.

 

Going on what I've read/seen 4.35GHz is around what most people have been getting.

It seems AMD's extracting as much performance as they can from these chips, i suppose that's a good thing but it sure spoils the fun of overclocking, all we've got left is OC'ing the RAM and IF.

 

Unacceptable at any price. Let alone on a £450 board.

And while I get that active cooling appears to be standard on X570, personally speaking it's an automatic no buy. If I go AMD, I'll be sticking with X470 boards as those small fans are never good for acoustics.

 

Perhaps people do need the extra features of X570 but personally I just can't see the need personally for the little extra that it brings over X470 - and for ~£170 more

 

Given that it's rarely even running, and will be next to much larger fans that are always running, it's hard to see how this fan will affect acoustics to any extent, much less to make the board a no-buy.

 

It's also hard to see why the reviewer is concerned with the active cooling fan being open, when (1) it won't run often and (2) there will be at least two much larger open fans on the mobo that are always running, and much faster! Except for the tiny percent of users who will have water on everything. This seems like simply looking for something to criticize. I'm further guessing that this fan can be disabled with no practical consequences.

 

Having owned a board in the past with little 40mm fans on it I can assure you that they are definitely audible above 120mm or 140mm fans (it was one of the TUF Sabertooth Z87 boards where they had put 'armour' on it but then they required fans under the 'armour' as it still needed the airflow). Unlike the gentle 'whoosh' of large fans, small fans typically produce a high-pitched whine.

The opposite is true - the smaller the fan, the faster it has to spin and so normally (not always) the louder it is. Take, for example, Noctua - their 200mm fans spin at 800rpm, their 140mm fans at around 1200rpm but their 40mm fans spin at 5000rpm.

 

Also there are concerns other than noise:
Durability: Moving parts inevitably suffer wear and tear and considering how deeply integrated those fans are into the stick on tat... fan replacements are going to be hard.
WC block compatibility: You can't just rip off the southbridge heatsink and stick on a waterblock like we did back in the days of DFI and ABIT, again related to how deeply integrated the cooling is within the stick on tat.

(ironically the "cheap" X570 boards that have less stick on tat are much better better when it comes to those problems mentioned)

 

The thing is it's not even like you need the fan in most situations. If a board doesn't allow a zero duty cycle, preferably adjustable, I'd think twice about buying it.

Then again I'd probably just disconnect the fan or replace the entire heatsink, not that I'm suggesting anyone does that on a brand new board.

 

Larger fans typically run slower, not faster (as the larger blades can push more air per revolution) and as a result tend to be both quieter and less unpleasant in terms of pitch.

And I don't know about you, but my PC is set up to idle so that the case fans don't run at all, and the CPU cooler fans run at 300 rpm, at which point they are genuinely inaudible.

 

I remember chipset fans, was it on a Foxconn board or something i had? Can't remember.

Godawful whiny nasty things. I would want to slap a heatsink on it (which appears to be good enough).

 

Undeterred by all the warnings of nasty small whiny noisy awful junk tiny fans, I bought one of these beautifully crafted mobos. Amazingly, the chipset fan rarely or never even spins, is inaudible when it does (in a very open case), and can be disabled if desired. Who'd a thunk it?

It's obviously just there to meet specs or some extreme usage scenario. And to give people something to thoughtlessly rant about as "a deal-breaker". What a laugh.