MSI Meg X570 Ace AM4 ATX Motherboard

I purchased my MSI MEG X570 Ace about a month ago, and rather than posting my first impressions (which were fairly positive) I though I would use it for a while to give a proper review, so after using it for a while I want to list the things I like and the things I don’t like:Likes:Aesthetics – This is a very good-looking motherboard, the dark bronze\gold and black theme it has is understated and is much better than the in your face design choices other manufactures have used. The subtle RGB “infinity mirror” covering the rear I/O fits nicely without being over the top.3 M.2 slots – Having 3 M.2 slots on a standard ATX board is impressive, though they have had to make a couple of sacrifices to fit them on. There are 3 rather than 4 PCI-E 16X slots and only 4 ... MoreI purchased my MSI MEG X570 Ace about a month ago, and rather than posting my first impressions (which were fairly positive) I though I would use it for a while to give a proper review, so after using it for a while I want to list the things I like and the things I don’t like:Likes:Aesthetics – This is a very good-looking motherboard, the dark bronze\gold and black theme it has is understated and is much better than the in your face design choices other manufactures have used. The subtle RGB “infinity mirror” covering the rear I/O fits nicely without being over the top.3 M.2 slots – Having 3 M.2 slots on a standard ATX board is impressive, though they have had to make a couple of sacrifices to fit them on. There are 3 rather than 4 PCI-E 16X slots and only 4 SATA ports to allow them to fit in all these M.2. Having 4 16X PCI-E slots isn’t a deal breaker though as rarely do people use more than two graphics cards these days and I would argue that an additional M.2 would suit more people than an additional 16X slot.Chipset cooling – This was a big worry for me getting a X570 board, chipset fans are small and fairly high speed and can cause an annoying whine that most cases won’t completely block out. However, MSI thought of this and have connected the chipset heatsink to the VRM heatsinks with a heatpipe. The result of this is that in all my testing the chipset fan has either never turned on, or if it has it has been at such a slow speed that I haven’t noticed it at all. Manually turning it on it becomes rather noticeable at 50-60% of it’s maximum speed, and has the aforementioned annoying whine, but as it never seems to come on, this is a rather moot point.2.5gb and 1gb LAN onboard – This is great, I have been able to connect my NAS machine with 2.5gb support directly to this machine in addition to the network using it’s other port, and also connect to my router via the 1gb LAN port and thankfully Windows seems to always use the 2.5gb connection when accessing files from it whilst other things are able to use the 1gb connection.VRM design - I am particularly impressed by the VRM design, MSI are using the IR35201 which is a well-regarded 6+2 design voltage regulator, feeding 6 IR3599 doublers to split the PWM signal into 12 IR3555 power stages, each of these power stages are rated at 60 amps giving the board a maximum theoretical rating of 720 amps, this is well in excess of what anyone will be pushing this board to in normal usage and as a result the VRMs are kept nice and cool by running them significantly under their maximum rating.WiFi antenna design – I don’t use WiFi on my desktop, but the inclusion of a WiFi antenna that isn’t just a small afterthought is a fantastic inclusion, whilst I haven’t used it on this motherboard I have attached it to another device where I do use WiFi and the signal integrity improved and I saw a boost in speed of ~30% over using the standard “rabbit ears” type of antenna that were previously used.Board Explorer view in BIOS – This is an amazing feature, there is an option in the bios that takes you to an image of the board where you can hover over each area with your mouse and see what is currently plugged into it and the details of the device. This saved me a large amount of time troubleshooting when I set things up for the first time as I was able to see exactly what was plugged in, and that I hadn’t seated 1 of my sticks of RAM correctly at a glance.Rear I/O – I really appreciate the large number of USB 3 ports on the rear I/O, there are 3 x USB 3.1 G2, 1 x USB 3.1 G2 Type-C, 2 x USB 3.1 G1 and 2 x USB 2.0, that is plenty for my needs and the inclusion of the Type C port at the rear and another Type C header for front panel connections is a very welcome inclusion. It also has the fairly standard 5 3.5mm audio jack outputs along with a SPDIF optical output that should cover most people needs nicely along with a very useful BIOS reset button and a BIOS flashing button that I believe allows updating the BIOS with no CPU installed.Dislikes:4 SATA ports – This is a slight disappointment, I came from a board with 8 SATA ports, and the flexibility this allowed was welcome. I understand that due to PCI-E lane restrictions of having 3 M.2 slots that there is only enough left for 4 ports, but other manufacturers have allowed 6-8 ports and disable anything over the first 4 if 3 M.2 devices are used, that may have been a more preferable solution if you required more SATA.Pump PWM header – This is no doubt a bug that will be fixed in future BIOS updates, but as of BIOS version 7C35v13 and MSI’s Dragon center software version 1.0.25.0 the pump fan seems to forget its smart fan\PWM settings upon the computer waking from sleep. This is a minor annoyance that takes a few seconds to fix by opening the dragon software and hitting apply and not everyone will actually be using all of the fan headers on the board so you can just avoid the pump fan header until this is fixed in an update.Overall I would highly recommend this motherboard, the particular highlights are the low noise of the chipset fan that rarely spins up due to the heatpipe linking it to the VRM and efficient VRM design and the 3 M.2 slots.Performance of everything as a whole has been spectacular, I upgraded from a highly overclocked Phenom II X6 to this board and a Ryzen 3700X adding 2 M.2 drives for windows/games and the speed of everything has been night and day in comparison.I was previously fairly heavily bottlenecking my graphics card, using my old card (GTX 970) I saw an almost doubling of framerates in the majority of games I play and adding in the Vega 56 card I bought alongside this has seen my performance increase even further allowing me to up the settings to max on everything at 1440p.Overclocking has been my only slight disappointment; I have not been able to go into this in great depth and am not totally confident in my abilities overclocking Ryzen as things have moved on since the Phenom days. I have so far not been able to nail down any settings that are able to beat the precision boost overdrive that the processor is able to use automatically, this isn’t a big issue for me as I know the issue is in my knowledge gap rather than any inherent BIOS or motherboard issues due to many people being able to overclock this board/processor combo to quite high levels completely stably.

This may be a great motherboard, but the one i received was defective. The problem was a little hard to determine, but after building dozens of computers for personal use since 2002, one learns some things.I was getting blue screens , and the system very unstable. I wasn't able to run my Corsair memory at the rated frequency of 4000mhz, at first, being that it was causing BSODs, i assumed the most logical on these cases, one of the memory sticks must be bad. But then i tried removing all four memory sticks, and installing each one individually, while doing a full memory diagnostic. To my surprise, with a single stick of memory installed on Slot A2, the system was perfectly fine, and no BSODs. So i tested every memory stick, and they all passed the test without ... MoreThis may be a great motherboard, but the one i received was defective. The problem was a little hard to determine, but after building dozens of computers for personal use since 2002, one learns some things.I was getting blue screens , and the system very unstable. I wasn't able to run my Corsair memory at the rated frequency of 4000mhz, at first, being that it was causing BSODs, i assumed the most logical on these cases, one of the memory sticks must be bad. But then i tried removing all four memory sticks, and installing each one individually, while doing a full memory diagnostic. To my surprise, with a single stick of memory installed on Slot A2, the system was perfectly fine, and no BSODs. So i tested every memory stick, and they all passed the test without errors (while installed on slot A2, B1 and B2. The problem came back as soon as i populated (installed) any memory stick on slot A1. CMOS were reset, the computer was reassembled from scratch again, to make sure no wire, or anything would be shorting anything in the back. A soon as i run the system with memory Slot A1, the problem persisted.I visited the MSI webpage, i had to create an account, i registered the Motherbosrd and submitted a RMA request with all the information and explaining the problem. They approved the RMA, but warned me that the turnaround time for them to repair and send the Motherboard back was 35 business days excluding shipping time. This is simply unacceptable. Without a motherboard, there simply is no system, and we need a computer to work.Given the poor quality control, the horrible RMA process, and the ridiculously unacceptable time frame for them to send me a repaired board back, i deeply regret having chosen an MSI motherboard for my Ryzen 9 build. I am working with B&H which is phenomenal, in order to get this thing resolved as soon as possible, the only issue is that they have this motherboard out of stock, and i can't just buy a new one and then send this one back. So, lesson learned. No more MSI motherboards for this or any other future build.

My 2.5G LAN port has been giving issues since I bought this Motherboard.I didn't think anything of it at the time because it would only occasionally drop the connection for like 5-10 seconds maybe twice a day.All of a sudden, a couple weeks ago it stopped working completely.I use the 2.5G port because I have over 1gbit internet speeds to my home. I use the multi-gig port on my router/modem side (Netgear CAX80).I have tried every possible combination of new cables, different ports on both the router and computer, including the 1gig port on both.Every port works except for my MSI motherboard's 2.5G port.I've reset the BIOS, updated the bios, reinstalled windows, and tried both windows 10 and windows 11.I could not solve the problem on my own.It doesn't ... MoreMy 2.5G LAN port has been giving issues since I bought this Motherboard.I didn't think anything of it at the time because it would only occasionally drop the connection for like 5-10 seconds maybe twice a day.All of a sudden, a couple weeks ago it stopped working completely.I use the 2.5G port because I have over 1gbit internet speeds to my home. I use the multi-gig port on my router/modem side (Netgear CAX80).I have tried every possible combination of new cables, different ports on both the router and computer, including the 1gig port on both.Every port works except for my MSI motherboard's 2.5G port.I've reset the BIOS, updated the bios, reinstalled windows, and tried both windows 10 and windows 11.I could not solve the problem on my own.It doesn't stop there. Fast forward to the day I'm leaving this review having just received my board back from RMA and I had to write this message to MSI support... Haven't had any response from them."Hello, I just received my board back from the RMA service (RMA number: EMAX*********), and it's broken even worse than before I sent it off! I sent it in for only a malfunctioning ethernet port but now It won't even boot anymore. It just freezes with code 4d on the debug led screen. I tried removing everything but just one stick of ram, CPU, and GPU but it still won't boot. I went to Best Buy" (no microcenter near my home, unfortunately) "and bought a cheap ASUS B550 board, installed my components onto it and it booted just fine. So, it's definitely this particular MSI X570 MEG ACE. I tried using the bios USB button to flash the bios to the latest version with the latest bios renamed to MSI.ROM and it seems to be flashing correctly but it still won't boot after flashing. the board they sent back was the same exact motherboard and the Remarks on the packing slip say: "Repaired OK", but it doesn't look like they did anything to the board. Shipping this heavy board back and forth costs me 22 dollars (USPS Priority Mail insured) every time, as I have to do it all the way back across the country to California."