HOW WE TESTED

WE KNEW THIS SUPERTEST was going to be a turbulent one, because of how brand new architectures tend to operate, so we cast our net wide from the start, but that didn’t prevent a few headaches along the way.

Taking a cross section from MSI, Asus, and Gigabyte, we originally chose nine motherboards, both X370 and B350, before whittling the list down to five. Four boards didn’t make it through—three due to testing failures, and one simply didn’t arrive in time.

Notable mentions: the Asus Prime X370Pro and the MSI B350 Tomahawk. We spoke briefly earlier about how each section of Asus’s massive structure is broken down into individual teams, with each part working autonomously— unfortunately, not all parts are equal. ROG vastly outshines the Pro team when it comes to BIOS stability—in fact, we bricked two Prime X370Pros. One during the initial Ryzen launch via a BIOS update, and the replacement died following a similar event (although it made it past the update, failing to boot Windows). With the Tomahawk, we didn’t even make it to BIOS, unfortunately, regardless of what configuration we used. That’s not to say these motherboards are a no-go area, just that if you’re thinking of buying cheap, yet still want to push the boundaries when it comes to running above stock 2,133MT/s or processor overclocks, it might be worth holding off for a month or two longer.

For the time being, it seems Ryzen’s top-end chipset has had most of the bugs ironed out, at least for the more premium lines associated with each brand. However, the budget-oriented options may need a little extra time.

Our testing setup consisted of an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, 16GB (2x 8GB) of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 capable of clocking up to 3,000MT/s (provided by AMD), an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, a Samsung 850 Evo 250GB OS drive, with a clean install of Windows 10, plus an ADATA SX8000 256GB PCIe SSD to test out the M.2 ports, and you can see how each board performed below.