Finished Looks

OK, so my camera obviously overexposed these a bit, and those lights aren't really that bright, but you get the point. There are no crazy lights coming off this board, other than a few LEDs under the chipset cooler, and those aren't overly bright.


Yet go a bit lower, and oh wow, can I have my eyesight back? The POST display is clearly bright, and maybe a bit too bright. It really shouldn't overpower the chipset LEDs like that.

Test System

Out of the box, we get a very standard performance profile with things boosting up to 3900 MHz when "the time is right". AMD's latest platform is completely different from what they offered before for CPU designs, but there isn't much of a difference between the 1800X and this 1700X I'm using for testing, other than a couple hundred MHz of clockspeed.

By default, the memory is clocked at 2133 MHz only, as is the case for many "enthusiast-grade" kits on the market today. I'd kind of like to see more start off at 2400 MHz or 2666 MHz, but that doesn't have anything to do with motherboards, does it?