GIGABYTE X570S AORUS PRO AX (rev. 1.1) AMD Ryzen 3000 PCIe 4.0 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.2 AMD X570S ATX Motherboard

Pros: - Looks great
- Has plenty of fan headers (I have a Fractal Torrent case, which comes with 5 fans, and I added a sixth, and my CPU cooler has two fans - this motherboard can handle them all)
- Has plenty of M.2 slots
- The M.2 heatsinks have captive screws, so you don't have to worry about the screws getting lost while installing the M.2 drives
- The spacing of the three PCIe x16 slots is great - I have a 2.5 slot x16 GPU, an x8 SFP+ (10 Gbps fiber) NIC, and an x4 USB card, and I can use them all at the same time!
- Easy to disable the RGB from within the BIOS (I'm not a fan of RGB)
- Can flash the BIOs without CPU or memory installed
- Has ECC memory support and Gigabyte even lists ECC modules in the QVL on their support website
- 2.5 GbE Intel NIC
- WiFi 6E with Bluetooth 5.2 built-in
- Very good IOMMU groupings for people who do pass-through virtualization
- Fan curve customizer lets you easily pick what temperatures you want each fan to target (e.g. you can have different fans respond to the temperature of the CPU, GPU, ambient, etc.)

Cons: - My ethernet controller died within a day of use. WiFI still worked fine, but not ethernet. I've dealt with Gigabyte's warranty process in the past, so when this happened, I just returned it to Newegg rather than deal with the headache that is Gigabyte support. The second board has been going strong, though!
- The WiFi antenna looks pretty gamer-y, and I'm really not into that aesthetic
- The default fan curve is fairly linear. This seems logical (fan speed should increase with temperature) but in practice it's quite distracting since our brains are good at filtering out static background noise, but changing volumes (e.g. fans slowly ramping up on a linear curve as you play a game) tend to annoy us a lot more. You can, of course, use the BIOS fan curve adjuster to make a more sensible curve (e.g. 50% fans until 70 C, then 100% fans), but it would be nice if they had such a preset built-in. But I'm not docking an egg for it, since I've yet to encounter a motherboard with good fan curve presets. Just venting.
- For a motherboard that launched at $300 (it's now permanently discounted to $220 and gets dropped to $215 occasionally), it really should have a POST code display on the board instead of LEDs
- One of the USB 3 headers is at a right angle. Some people may love this for cable management purposes, but it's also super easy to accidentally destroy pins with them. I didn't destroy any pins this time, but I have an aversion to USB 3 right-angle headers from my past experiences with them.
- By default, this motherboard will install the bloatware known as the "Gigabyte App Center" on Windows systems. Thankfully, I use Linux, so I don't have to worry about this, but I absolutely hate these kinds of "features" with a passion. This is called "APP Center Download & Install", and I believe it's located under "Settings" -> "Miscellaneous" in the BIOS. Note that this setting resets every time you update the BIOS, so make sure you keep that in mind when updating.

Overall Review: I got this for a Zen 3 build (with a Ryzen 7 5700X) and it's been working great. I undervolted my CPU with the curve optimizer set to -20 and it's been running like a champ. I also use ECC memory that's not on the QVL (v-Color TE432G32D822K-VC 2x32GB 3200 MHz CL22) and it works just fine with no tweaking required.

The PCIe slots on this motherboard are great. Many motherboards either have just two x16s and one x1 or an x16, then another x16 which will be blocked by many GPUs with larger heatsinks, then an x1. It's ridiculous for an ATX board to have such suboptimal PCIe slot placement, but sadly the market has largely abandoned more niche use cases like my own. This is one of the few good boards left that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

I dislike the included WiFI antenna because it looks very gamer-y. If you're not into that aesthetic (I'm certainly not), get yourself a couple of RP-SMA male antennas when you buy the motherboard.

If you care about IOMMU groupings, make sure to set the following BIOS settings:
- Tweaker -> Advanced CPU Settings -> SVM Mode -> Enable
- Settings -> Miscellaneous -> IOMMU -> Enable
- Settings -> AMD CBS -> ACS Enable -> Enable
- Settings -> AMD CBS -> Enable AER Cap -> Enable

Overall, this motherboard isn't perfect, but it's a very good board in this price range, especially for power users who need more PCIe slots than just one for a GPU. I appreciate how Gigabyte continues to put ECC on their QVL, when many other motherboards have ECC outright disabled. If you have a lot of fans in your case, this motherboard is also great, with 6 case fan headers and 2 CPU fan headers.

This motherboard was a pleasure to work with and I would recommend it to anyone who wants a powerful motherboard for their AM4 system. If I could change any one thing about this board, it would be the lack of a POST code display. I very much prefer POST code displays to tiny LEDs on the motherboard.

Pros: Second one seems ok so far.

Cons: First one wouldnt let me into bios randomly and had ram recognition issues.

Overall Review: Id wait a bit. Its a new product.