I have to put warnings in my posts so people don't accidentally read them. If this is too long, go do something more productive with your time.
I don't know if I posted this already, indeed, AsRocks VRMs on Pro and Taichi series seem rock solid, provided you have some airflow coming from case fans. My AB350M Pro4 seems to cope pretty well with the R5 1600 power demands, just one unrelated issue, the PCB is brittle AF on the corners, I managed to brick my FP header a second time, (once on my original one and second time on the RMA board that I am currently running). All it took was plugging it in, I heard an audible crack when the PCB bent slightly from the force required to connect the cable. I never had that happen on any other motherboard in my life! Must have been a bad batch of motherboards that got shipped... Or just plain bad luck. I still can't get over how it happened twice and only now in 13 years.
A lot of 1st gen Ryzen boards weren't up to par to Intel counterparts, there's threads putting that under the looking glass. It seems that most of the glaring issues are gone with the 2nd gen Ryzen boards. But that might change, as there are no B-series boards released for the 2nd gen yet. I want to see a decent B chipset uATX variants, but since they messed up once, I don't hold much hope for fixing the gripes I have with B350 and the cheaper X370 boards.
I really frowned upon pretty much every B350 board stuck with decade old Realtek's ALC889 (yes I looked at the datasheet). When even the better 1150 has been replaced by 1220 already. A few bucks for a noticeably better solution is fine with me. The fact that they are not putting the best and newest even on what seems to be a higher end board, is messed up from my perspective. Note, even the recent Intel B360 boards have the same problem. The AB350M Pro4 I have has the worst audio results out of all B350 motherboards according to hardware.info.
I've bought some good bookshelf speakers and I can't use their max potential, hell, my old smartphone has a superior DAC integrated (i know there's electrical interference/radiation on a desktop, but c'mon). Why put a legacy codec on a mid-range motherboard in 2017? WTF.
Mid-range AM3+ motherboards had ALC 1150 dammit. I would gladly sacrifice the RGB lighting for better audio any day, my preference. But I would love to have both, OK.
Edit: I just saw a high-end Z370 motherboard with ALC 892 and not 1220. Did Realtek stop production of the 1220 or they are clearing 10 year old inventory? That would make sense, but what does not is a pricey piece of fiberglass not having what it should in its price point.
I know copper has risen in price, so more stuff in a board = more pcb layers = more copper traces, not to mention all the other metals used. But the prices for new motherboards (especially the high-end) nowadays seem higher to me for some reason, or is it just me? Must have been all that RGB lighting, oversized heatsinks with no fins and gaming monikers that's addling the design team's brains or something, the marketing team just doesn't care and runs with it. Or does that make too much sense and all of the above is true?
At least that one motherboard from EVGA and now even Gigabyte has boards with actual heatsinks for the VRM, though they are reserving those only for the high-end.
"Hey, let's price this thing up the ass but cut corners. If they want the "best" well, they better buy that $300 board."
In any case, nobody seems to be nagging any of the other board makers to make changes, so I guess everything is totally fine and I am simply overreacting on part of being an entitled jackass, right?
I know everything is better than it was a decade ago, but everything should be even better now. I'm hoping there's that perfect motherboard someday. Well there are a few that get close, but most of them are on Intel's platform, would be sweet to go and have something like Super Socket 7 days where you could use the AMD and Intel CPU's in the same motherboard. Yeah, not going to ever happen with exclusive features, different power requirements and a completely different architecture.
Just thinking about it makes me want to stick an AMD CPU in one of those replacing the Intel one, I've never done it before myself. Good thing there are some channels that still dabble in the technical and nostalgia side of things, and remind us of the history of PC industry. Probably a more interesting time, back then a CPU would become almost obsolete in mere months after a new release when they bumped up the clock speeds or added cache.
I'm going off the rails, so I'll just stop now. If you thought Buildzoid rambles too much in his videos, I'm on a higher level.
