The ASRock X570S PG Riptide Motherboard Review: A Wave of PCIe 4.0 Support on A Budget

Board Features

The ASRock X570S PG Riptide is an ATX motherboard designed for everyday users and gamers looking to use AMD's Ryzen 5000 and 3000 series on a budget. Designed around a new passively cooled chipset heatsink, the X570S series typically allows vendors to update controller sets to the latest chips, although the PG Riptide is more about squeezing in as much value as possible. 

Some of the board's main features include three full-length PCIe 4.0 slots that are operating at x16/+4/+2, with three smaller PCIe 4.0 x1 slots. For storage, ASRock includes one PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, one PCIe 4.0 x4/SATA M.2 slot, and six SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, and 10 arrays. In the top right-hand corner of the board, there are four memory slots with support for DDR4-5000 and a maximum capacity of up to 128 GB.

Touching on cooling support, ASRock includes seven 4-pin fan headers, with one for a CPU fan, one for a water pump or second CPU fan, and five headers designed for chassis fans. 

In terms of connectivity, the X570S PG Riptide has one USB 3.2 G2 Type-C, one USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A, and two USB 2.0 ports. Networking capability consists of a single Killer E3100G 2.5 GbE controller, while the board's five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical output are controlled by a Realtek ALC897 HD audio codec. ASRock does include a BIOS Flashback button on the rear panel, as well as a single HDMI 2.1 video output for users looking to leverage the integrated graphics on Ryzen APUs.

Test Bed

As per our testing policy, we take a high-end CPU suitable for the motherboard released during the socket’s initial launch and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the processor maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance. While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS. Most users will fall back on JEDEC supported speeds - this includes home users and industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.

Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives, in essence, an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, overriding memory sub-timings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.

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