Aorus Xtreme 570x paired with a 5950x review

Abscissa15

Since the release of the 5900x and 5950x CPU's, I have seen reviews on the most popular tech sites that pair these procs with either the MSI Godlike or Asus Crosshair MB's. I listed over a dozen. So, has anyone seen these procs reviewed with Gigabyte's flagship, the Aorus Xtreme ? Just bad luck I guess that the major reviewers don't have this board or is the MSRP too high and it is dismissed ? Thanks for any response - I may have missed something.

Vrika

Same chipsets give nearly identical performance. Just look at 5950x review on any x570 motherboard, and those benchmarks will apply to all x570 motherboards.

You buy different motherboards for different extra features. Not because the CPU would perform differently.

Cleffy

The differences between mobos with the same chipset is insignificant at stock. It's when people go beyond stock that the differences show. Outside of extreme overclocking, there won't be a discernable difference between them regardless of vendor.

Quizzical

remsleep said:

Cleffy said:

The differences between mobos with the same chipset is insignificant at stock. It's when people go beyond stock that the differences show. Outside of extreme overclocking, there won't be a discernable difference between them regardless of vendor.

the difference is in the quality of the VRM - high quality VRM mobos are a lot more expensive even if using the same chipset as their cheapo cousins.

Also mobos can use higher quality caps and other components that will prolong life, again - higher cost

That makes a huge difference if you're going for a large overclock.  At stock settings, not so much.

Quizzical

remsleep said:

Quizzical said:

remsleep said:

Cleffy said:

The differences between mobos with the same chipset is insignificant at stock. It's when people go beyond stock that the differences show. Outside of extreme overclocking, there won't be a discernable difference between them regardless of vendor.

the difference is in the quality of the VRM - high quality VRM mobos are a lot more expensive even if using the same chipset as their cheapo cousins.

Also mobos can use higher quality caps and other components that will prolong life, again - higher cost

That makes a huge difference if you're going for a large overclock.  At stock settings, not so much.

Yep - at stock it won't make much difference other than MAYBE mobo lifespan.

Perhaps it was a bad assumption on my part - since I always run overclock on all my systems - as that's my baseline. Now sometimes it's a pretty conservative overclock - like 10%-15%, all depends on stability.

But IMO - ponying up for a quality motherboard with good VRM and quality components as well as quality PSU - it's worth it to me.

For Ryzen 2000 series and later CPUs, overclocking is rather dumb in most cases.  Unless you know that workloads that push all cores are the only ones you care about, precision boost is so good that it the stock settings will outperform your manual overclock in many situations.

Quizzical

remsleep said:

Quizzical said:

remsleep said:

Quizzical said:

remsleep said:

Cleffy said:

The differences between mobos with the same chipset is insignificant at stock. It's when people go beyond stock that the differences show. Outside of extreme overclocking, there won't be a discernable difference between them regardless of vendor.

the difference is in the quality of the VRM - high quality VRM mobos are a lot more expensive even if using the same chipset as their cheapo cousins.

Also mobos can use higher quality caps and other components that will prolong life, again - higher cost

That makes a huge difference if you're going for a large overclock.  At stock settings, not so much.

Yep - at stock it won't make much difference other than MAYBE mobo lifespan.

Perhaps it was a bad assumption on my part - since I always run overclock on all my systems - as that's my baseline. Now sometimes it's a pretty conservative overclock - like 10%-15%, all depends on stability.

But IMO - ponying up for a quality motherboard with good VRM and quality components as well as quality PSU - it's worth it to me.

For Ryzen 2000 series and later CPUs, overclocking is rather dumb in most cases.  Unless you know that workloads that push all cores are the only ones you care about, precision boost is so good that it the stock settings will outperform your manual overclock in many situations.

I don't own any Ryzen 2000s or later - that's probably why.

But the Ryzen 9 5950X that the original poster is asking about does offer such precision boost.  With 16 cores, an all-core overclock probably wouldn't be very high, and would reduce performance even in programs that pushed several cores but not close to all of them.

Abscissa15

I thank you all for the feedback - it's a privilege to be associated with a knowledgeable community. I've been fiddling for 9 years with a PC design that's built into an exotic wood desk (to be built) with a tempered glass surface. Now I've finally saved enough cash to pull the trigger and go all out best of the best with all components. Gaming is the main goal, however I will also be using 3-D woodworking project software and 3-D molecular modeling software, both of which apply multi-threading. For today's snapshot, AMD wears the crown for both single and multi-thread benchmarks. I've historically been an Intel supporter for the most part but I'm not prejudiced either way in terms of what to buy.

Back on point: I "need" to overclock, if just a little just for the sake of doing it, unless I discover that as @Quizzical suggests, precision boost at stock outperforms the OC. I suppose that between MSI and Gigabyte flagship MB's the VRM's will both be top notch - they should be for the prices that those products demand. It may come down to all BIOS's not being equal. I've seen some feedback criticizing Gigabyte for crappy MB software that deteriorates file explorer applications, particularly the RGB programs. I like the Aorus Xtreme but if no one is reviewing it in 2020, particularly with Ryzen 5000 processors, I may chose the MSI Godlike. The jury is still out.

Thank you again for the enlightenment. I'll post pics and specs when the project is completed in 2021.

Asm0deus

I have never played with the x570 gigabyte boards but in the discord I hang in where peeps do OC and led bling and the like most feel the aorus extreme isn't worth the money.

You pay a big premium just because it doesn't have a fan and is passive cooling which means more silent.

It does, natively, have some better vrm cooling than say the aorus master however most tell me that mainly because GB used crappy material between the chipset and heatsink on the master which you can remove and replace with thermal paste which lowers temperatures considerably (10-15C).

Even not doing this most tell me they don't feel it's worth the extra money for the extreme unless you want no chipset fan for a quieter board and have money to piss away since most x570 boards have beefy enough vrm's anyways.

Ryzen doesn't have huge OC potential so...

For the OP it sounds like you do have money to piss away so in that situation I would just buy the aorus extreme.

While I recently bought a x570 tomahawk wifi, not installed yet waiting on my back order 5800x, I do have other msi boards however, and will say lately MSI software really and I mean really sucks nuggets.

Dragon center has been complete garbage lately..it's like it was programmed by a bunch of 9 years olds just learning how to code so I would read up on that in the msi reddit before forking out for a top of the line msi board.

Frankly I was hoping to get a asus strix E gaming board during BF but if never went on sale and 500$cad or so was just too much  for my budget and the x570 tomahawk is just as good vrm wise and I got it for just a tad under 300$cad all included.

As for the MSI software I will deal with it and and even have a guide, from the msi reddit to remove the bloat from dragon center so hopefully I wont have too many issues.

Only thing I am planning to OC is the ram tbh using 1usmus software, if he can update his ryzen clock tuner tool soon I might give it a try for fun but doubt I would leave it OC.

Also in case you haven't seen this, in orange means it barely made the tier, in blue means it did better than most in the tier list and black average performance for the tier:

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1137619-motherboard-vrm-tier-list-v2-currently-amd-only/

Quizzical

The reason precision boost at stock settings often outperforms overclocks is that it can selectively clock some cores higher than others.  At stock, it can clock a single core as high as 4.9 GHz.  But you can't overclock all 16 cores to 4.9 GHz at once, as that would burn so much power that you can't cool it.  If your all-core overclock is only 4.5 GHz, then anything that uses few enough cores that it can clock the ones you are using higher than that will perform better at stock settings.  That will probably include most games.

Ridelynn

Abscissa15 said:

Back on point: I "need" to overclock, if just a little just for the sake of doing it, unless I discover that as @Quizzical suggests, precision boost at stock outperforms the OC. I suppose that between MSI and Gigabyte flagship MB's the VRM's will both be top notch - they should be for the prices that those products demand. It may come down to all BIOS's not being equal. I've seen some feedback criticizing Gigabyte for crappy MB software that deteriorates file explorer applications, particularly the RGB programs. I like the Aorus Xtreme but if no one is reviewing it in 2020, particularly with Ryzen 5000 processors, I may chose the MSI Godlike. The jury is still out.

Yeah it's true - CPU overclocking is all but dead. You can still get some performance out of tweaking RAM timings, since RAM clocking is still pretty archaic and static, and possibly a bit of overclock and performance boost there.

AMD's auto-overclocking tools (PBO and the like) are able to use real-time sensors to dynamically adjust clocks and voltages to optimize the performance. You, as a person just pulling on BIOS exposed parameters, are only going to be able to do so much. For most cases, the built-in tools are going to give you better overall performance. There are a few corner cases you might be able to win with all-core fixed clocks, but not many.

For the record, Intel has the same tools - it's just that their CPUs are physically laid out different (monolithic vs chiplets), so you can still get decent all-core overclocks on an Intel chip and beat out the built-in tools in some cases. Larger core counts from Intel are starting to buck this trend though.

The biggest thing for PBO and the like is cooling. The motherboard does play some, but it's a pretty minor role - maybe 100 Mhz at the top sustained clock (at least until you start pushing LN2 and really strain the VRMs). Since temperature is one of the inputs into that dynamic clock equation, the cooler you can keep the chip, the faster and longer it will try to boost, and a good cooler is the difference between holding 4.6Ghz and 3.8 Ghz under load.

GPUs can still be overclocked, but that's mostly just because AIBs like to have different SKUs and want to sell you a pre-binned pre-overclocked card. Similar auto-overclocking tools on GPUs exist, and overclocking over there is usually just a matter of undervolting a bit and giving the card a bit more TDP headroom and letting the existing Boost algorithm do it's thing.

Pick a motherboard that you like that has the features you need. They will all perform similarly. To see the difference in performance between a $150 and $700 board will take custom water loops or LN2 cooling. 

Personally, I've had good luck with Asus and Gigabyte. I've heard good things about MSI but I've not tried one of their boards. A lot of folks swear by Asrock, as they tend to be a bit lower cost, but they tend to have thinner PCBs and the motherboards feel flimsy to me, so I've steered clear - but in all fairness most people seem to be pretty happy with them.

Abscissa15

Excellent commentary - thank you. @Azm0deus, I hadn't seen that info from Linustechtips - thanks. Shows the Godlike and the Aorus Xtreme both in the black. The no-fan MB cooling wasn't a selling point for the build as I'm planning to have two independent water cooling setups - one for the CPU (monoblock for VRM's would be nice but not yet available for those models) and one for GPU. Overclocking the RAM may be the best route. There are valid arguments by some. As far as having money to piss away bear in mind that I have been saving since 2013 to do this project and the exotic hardwoods for the desk (read case) aren't inexpensive by any means. So, yea, I guess I do in that respect. They used to call these "Dream Machines" 20 years ago.

Asm0deus

Abscissa15 said:

Excellent commentary - thank you. @Azm0deus, I hadn't seen that info from Linustechtips - thanks. Shows the Godlike and the Aorus Xtreme both in the black. The no-fan MB cooling wasn't a selling point for the build as I'm planning to have two independent water cooling setups - one for the CPU (monoblock for VRM's would be nice but not yet available for those models) and one for GPU. Overclocking the RAM may be the best route. There are valid arguments by some. As far as having money to piss away bear in mind that I have been saving since 2013 to do this project and the exotic hardwoods for the desk (read case) aren't inexpensive by any means. So, yea, I guess I do in that respect. They used to call these "Dream Machines" 20 years ago.

Yeah no problem!

The "pissing away" comment was just my colorful way to say you may have more disposable cash for this project than some people like myself, nothing wrong with that!

For ryzen I do think it's worth getting decent ram and OCing and and/or tightening the timings.

Sweet spots is 3200mhz c14 or 3600mhz c16.  For me anything that will give me in the 8ns range is enough but some get that down to the 7ns or better.

for 3200c14 that would be:

3200/2 = 1600

14/1600 = 0.00875

0.00875*1000 = 8.75ns

It's my quick calc to see when looking at ram if I want it or not along with is it  dual rank, single rank and reviews on how well it OC etc

For ram I wanna do two stick so I am looking at dual rank since my tomahawk x570 is a daisy chain board (daisy chain is optimized for 2 sticks and T topology for 4 sticks) and I want interleave benefits so need 4 ranks on two stick.