Hi there,

 

I'm in search for the right mainboard for my upcomming build. I'm pretty much set on the 3900x and got a case I want to use, so it has to be a micro-ATX AM4 board. Since I need 2 mechanical x16 PCIe slots and have 2 M.2 drives and 5 sata drives I need to connect the field of possible contendors is limited. Basicly it comes down to those four:

 

ASRock X570M Pro4
MSI MAG B550M Mortar
ASRock B550M Pro4
ASRock B550M Steel Legend

 

Another possibility could be to accept 4 SATA ports and throw in a SATA controller, that would make the ASUS TUF a possibility which seems to be popular.

 

I need some insight on which to choose for tinkering around with multiple VMs, HW passthrough and so on. I don't want to choose untested stuff so taking a reliable board is prefered to a fancy new one. Hope you can give me a recommendation.

 

Thanks!

Another thing: I didn't really think about buying a b450/x470 chipset board but since my choices are so limited that might be an option too. Would you buy a b450/x470 board in 2021?

On 2/18/2021 at 12:41 AM, epp said:

Another thing: I didn't really think about buying a b450/x470 chipset board but since my choices are so limited that might be an option too. Would you buy a b450/x470 board in 2021?

Hi, if the topic is still valid, I had the same question 6 months ago and I came to a conclusion that for a reasonable price I could get only one option.

This is Asrock x570m pro4. It has 8 SATA ports and 2 NVMe. With the last BIOS update you can also have the SB fan stopped most of the time.

It works in my NAS for about 5 months now with Ryzen 5 pro 3400ge and 4x16 ECC RAM.

x570/x470 was the only choice for me as b550 does not support my CPU.

with x570 mATX your choice is very limited. There are very few MBs to chose from. Other alternatives were MB from Biostar, but it's limited by SATA and Asrock Rack, but it's 3 times more expensive.

Other chipsets implemented in mATX like b450 does not fit to NAS, because even if the MB has 6x SATA ports, 2x of them will switch off as soon as you install NVMe.

Hey koaly,

I ended up getting the x570m pro4 too  Very happy with it so far, about to setup my gaming vm.

As a hint, I have changed the SB fan to Noctua A4x20 FLX. Simply removed the useless heatsink and the build-in fan and attached the Noctua fan with the double sticky tape. Then it also needs to make an adapter for the fan, but it was easy using a cable from old GPU. Noctua is absolutely silent.

I use it with R5pro 3400ge with ECC DDR. I have recently had to return the MB, because all of a sudden it started giving me 5 short beeps during POST, but the CPU works just fine. Waiting for the replacement

I'm looking at similar boards as the Asrock matx X570 board is now impossible to find for a reasonable price. Please let me know what you end up getting, and how it works out.