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Thanks to producing a Ryzen overclocking Pro Cast episode for MSI, we got a new Ryzen setup with this MSI X570 Ace which we really put through its’ paces. We were able to really see some great performance gains from AMD, but how about the build quality and performance of this motherboard? Will this be the next board for you? Let’s find out!
MSI MEG X570 ACE overview
Alright so let’s check out this board. MSI’s latest MEG X570 ACE motherboard retails for between 370 to 400 dollars US, supporting the new AMD Ryzen 3000 processors, and they’re using a robust 12+2+1 IR digital power system for stable overclocking. The BIOS has lots of features and tweaks for full control.
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The MSI X570 Ace has three m.2 Lightning Gen4 slots for your ultra fast NVMe drives, all equipped with M.2 Shield Frozr heatsinks. Covering the VRMs is MSI’s Mystic Light Infinity Design, using this cool LED reflection effect. MSI’s Mystic Light controls onboard headers and you can sync or light up your whole PC and compatible peripherals as you like.
The 4 DIMM slots all have Steel Armor as well, supporting up to 128 gigs of DDR4, and can overclock selected RAM modules up to a theoretical 4600 megahertz. MSI has implemented an Extended Heat-Pipe design on their higher end boards, connecting the VRM banks all the way down to the X570 Frozr heatsink, and they have some form of fan implementation across their whole lineup as that X570 chip does run hot.
The MSI X570 Ace rear panel is equipped with Wi-Fi 6, the 802.11ax spec, along with onboard 2.5 gigabit and normal gigabit LAN, and the front has four sata-3 ports which you can configure with Easy Raid and m.2 Genie.
This MSI X570 Ace has dual 8-pin ATX power connectors to provide steady power while overclocking AMD’s newest Ryzen chip, and that feeds into MSI’s digital power design with Titanium Choke II’s
And perhaps most importantly, the three PCIe Gen 4 slots have Steel Armor reinforcement for a strong hold, important for the beast 2070 Super and 2080 Super cards. And the MSI X570 Ace supports both AMD Crossfire as well as SLI / NVLink setups.
Powering our rig is a Corsair HX850, which has good headroom for overclocking and graphics card draw. We’ll show some overclocking results, and of course overclocking needs a power supply with solid 12 volt rails, and you’ll likely need 2 ATX 8-pin connectors. We recommend at least a solid 700 to 800 watt PSU.
MSI X570 Ace test setup
For the DDR4 we have 32 gigs of Corsair’s Dominator Platinum RGB at 3000 megahertz, and we used an XPG 8200Pro 256 gig NVMe m.2 drive, comparable to Samsung for performance, giving blazing fast boot times in Windows 10 and accelerating game loading and productivity.
We’ve got the latest MSI X570 Ace BIOS, system and NVidia drivers installed, so let’s get into some results, and at stock speeds we’re getting 3100 points in Cinebench R15, almost a thousand marks up over a 9900K. Cinebench R20 is next, and scores an impressive 7,021 marks. We ran the standard Blender BMW test which finished in 2 minutes 40.9. Very nice scores at stock.
For overclocking results it’s important to have very good cooling. The Ryzen 9 3900X is a 12 core, 24 thread beast, running at a base 3.8 gigahertz, turbo-ing up to heavier single core workloads, though we never saw it hit its supposed 4.6 gigahertz frequency, more like 4.2 to 4.3.
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MSI X570 Ace benchmarks
To dump all this heat we’re using a hefty Corsair H150i PRO RGB 360 mil AIO liquid cooler, and we suggest using at least a 240 mil radiator for long term stable results.
Before the MSI X570 Ace’s results, a quick reminder that if you want to connect with us online, we’re on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook all at techspinreview. And there’s links below if you decide to grab a new motherboard, you can support the channel by using our affiliate links to buy, it’ll help us out here, with no extra cost to you.
Ok, so with just a quick core ratio adjust to 42 and XMP enabled, we fired up R15 and gained 131 points over stock, at 3,231 marks. Cinebench R20 we get a hair under 400 points up, very good, with a 7420 result.
Last was Blender BMW, and we rendered out 7 seconds faster at 2.33.43. If you have this or a similar setup, we’d like to hear your results and feedback in the comments below.
AMD likes talking about their Infinity Fabric, and here it is listed in BIOS as FCLK or F-Clock, and it runs at half your DDR4 rate, so for us it would be normally 1500. With XMP enabled we could post with it set to 1667 megahertz, but we found 1600 more stable. It does have an upper cap though, 1800 megahertz. So if you have a DDR4-4000 kit and overclock it to 4000, instead of 2000, it will still cap out at 1800.
Furthermore we could drive the CPU up to a stable 4.25 gigahertz. I’m not a pro-overclocker by any means, and those of you with more experience may be able to get even better results.
To see those results, please check out MSI’s Ryzen Overclocking guide, and I’ll throw the link here. We also go into details like BIOS a bit more there. we were impressed by the design and build quality, and we’re giving it a Techspin Platinum award, as we found it very sturdy and stable in testing, and we like the built-in Wi-Fi 6 and especially 2.5 gigabit LAN, forward thinking is always appreciated.
Okay so what’s the benefit of going with this 370 to 400 dollar board rather than another less expensive X570 option? You get a board much better suited for overclocking, with a more robust VRM solution, linked heat-pipe cooling to keep that hot X570 under control, steel armor for all slots, and cooling plates for all NVMe spots.
While market adoption for 10gig Ethernet is still slow, at this price point I was kinda hoping to see a 10 gig connector, but 2.5 is still way better than 1. We really need more users to request 10 gig Ethernet as one of their key buying points, but considering 5 years have passed since an initial push with no real traction for consumer adoption… I guess if you have gigabit it’s good enough, right?
One small nitpick with the MSI X570 Ace would be a slightly longer than normal BIOS startup when changing overclocking values. Nothing excessive, just a little bit more than normal.
Thanks again go to MSI for the gear we have, which allowed us to do some head to head testing we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise, and Corsair especially for their H150i Pro, which kept temps down and really allowed the Ryzen 3900X to perform to its best.
And if you want to get started with Ryzen 9 there are always other options out there, even MSI’s own line has an X570 A-Pro for $160 and X570 Gaming Plus for $170, still both decent contenders. If you’re considering the jump to Ryzen, we want to hear your thoughts and questions, down in the comments. Please take a second to hit Like, subscribe, the bell, and if you have a question or if we missed something, please tell us down below. And let us know what you’d like to see next!
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