Due to the board layout, one of the PCIe4 M.2 connectors will covered by the GPU, this makes a replacement painful and not great considering the heat produced by a modern NVME SSD/GPU Asus is the only brand to offer a Mini-ITX X670E board, and they're also the only brand to also offer a MicroATX X670E board. So that means we have one Mini-ITX, one MicroATX and 20 ATX boards on hand. Across the bottom of the board are several exposed headers. You’ll find the usual, including additional USB ports, RGB headers, and more. Below is a complete list from left to right. It's proof you don't have to spend loads of money on an expensive motherboard. Saving a couple of hundred dollars and putting it towards a faster CPU or better graphics card will deliver actual performance gains. Unless you need things like USB 4, 10G LAN or multiple PCIe 5.0 SSD support, you don't really lose all that much compared to more expensive boards. The Blazing M.2 accommodates the latest PCI Express 5.0 standard to perform twice the bandwidth compared to previous generation, with a breathtaking 128GB/s transfer speed, it is ready to unleash the full potential of future ultrafast SSDs.

For the stress test, we're using Cinebench R23 looped for an hour, at which point we're reporting the maximum PCB temperature recorded using the k-type thermocouples. An usual mid-tower would leave little to no room at the bottom slot for proper air ventilation. So it doesn't seem much of a mainstream solution to ask everyone to use the bottom slot (even aside of the mentioned issue of latency). For recording temperatures we're using a digital thermometer with K-Type thermocouples and we'll be reporting the peak rear PCB temperature. Finally, we're not reporting Delta-T over Ambient, instead I maintain a room temperature of 21 degrees and to ensure a consistent ambient temperature a thermocouple is positioned next to the test system. sailorjeff said:Well, I actually have this MB running a Ryzen 9-7900, Gskill 32gb memory at 6K mhz, Samsung 980 Pro and a Samsung 970 EVO. Graphics card is a Gigabyte 3080 with a 1200 watt Power Supply. I have some issues with the board.Essentially both boards have the same amount of PCIe bandwidth, the Carbon can just better spread that bandwidth across multiple slots while almost 90% of the PCIe bandwidth of the F Gaming is eaten up by the primary PCIe 5.0 x16 slot. The board is well made and gets the job done without any of the bells and whistles of the more expensive options out there. There are a few minor issues, hence not giving five stars. the closer to the cpu, the less latency in getting data to and from the cpu. that's why ram slots are as close as possible to minimize how far the data has to go thus lowering latency as much as possible. The extra large aluminum alloy M.2 heatsink effectively improves heat dissipation to keep those high speed M.2 SSDs as cool as possible, it is able to give better stability while maintaining top performance.

The ROG Strix X670E-I Gaming is an impressive ITX board, using ten 110A power stages for the vcore it ran very cool and although it features active cooling it was always silent in our testing. Admittedly, we tested it under the same conditions as all the other boards, so in a cramped ITX case it will likely run a bit hotter, but we're confident it's up to the task. i do agree though that covering the m.2 slot with a gpu, does take away using the heatsinks and such that can be needed or are just pretty to look at. i'm not sure where you could move it though to keep it close to the cpu, yet not under the gpu. lowering the pcie slot to put it above the gpu, though not very far, would add to the latency of the gpu and people would lose their freaking minds if some reviewer showed .2 fps less or some other trivial number due to moving it the couple inches. Modern and futuristic, with the attractive specifications and perfect balance, the Race Sport (RS) Edition is the evolution of the most popular PRO series motherboard. Its unique path takes aim at mainstream DIYers that drives an undeniable performance and trustable computing experience without a pricey upgrade. RaceSport edition, your all-rounder motherboard that fulfills every task and light-loading gaming – with style and speed!The I/O at the rear is excellent for a board at this price point. You get Wi-Fi 6E and Realtek 2.5G LAN which matches some much more expensive boards. Then you get DP 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 ports for use with the new integrated GPU capabilities of Ryzen 7000 CPUs. You also get USB4 support, 10 USB ports on the I/O panel, high quality external audio, two M.2 ports, 2.5 Gbit LAN and WiFi 6E, so it's a super well equipped ITX motherboard, but of course it's not exactly cheap.