X370 Chipset and Asus Motherboard
The board that we’re using for our testing is the Asus Prime X370 Pro. This is one of the most affordable X370 boards available and should gives us a great idea of base performance for Ryzen 7 and our 1700x.
The Asus board is aimed at providing the most cost effective/affordable feature set. It does include the X370 chipset as we have mentioned before, so with that we have crossfire support, 8 x SATA connections, M.2 SATA/PCIe 32Gb/s. The X370 chipset also includes better XFR support, which allows for even more automatic overclocking when your thermals allow.
The X370 chipset is offered as the Enthusiast level. This will bring all of the best features that the new AM4 platform as to offer.
This includes native USB 3.1 support (gen2), 6 x SATA connection (MB manufacturer can add more), with SATA Express and M.2 SATA support. The chipset itself also includes 8 PCIe lanes, which are directed for storage purposes and such.
The platform has also moved to DDR4. Speeds can range up to 2,666MHz, but can go higher. Memory speed greatly relies on motherboard performance among other factors, and anything above 2,400MHz can be unstable as we found using the Asus Prime with the 1700x.
2. Photos and Features
