I have this board, and love it.
But I wish they added heatpipes between the bigger cooler blocks...
On this and several other board's review
why do you list something as a pro then as a con???
It is not on ASUS that AMD only gave 24 PCIe lanes for the Ryzen 9000 CPU-s.
But in this case the board offer more option for you... so the second gen5 m.2 slot is great, even if you don't actually use.
The user has more options..
On the con regarding
top m.2 heatsink lacking full length thermal pads is really nitpicking, since you tested m.2 SSD in the several hundreds, yet never review an 20110 sized one.
On the:
The PCB is fairly busy thanks to the board offering four M.2 ports, USB4 and three x16 PCIe slots. Being X870E it also has two chipsets to fit in. The PCIe Slot Q-Release features means there are no extensions from the primary slot for buttons to release your graphics card, and you just lift the card up from the PCIe slot end to remove it.
Can we stop the thing which the manufacturers doing by lying?
Call them
full length slots instead!
three full length PCIe slots with 16/8/4 × wired.
I can tell there is only one 16 lane slot, I swear!