Overclocking
After so much hands-on time with the 3900X at this point, I can dial it in on a new motherboard pretty quickly. It really only requires adjusting the vCore and setting the multiplier to what I’m looking for. Generally, this is easily done in Ryzen Master and takes more time to verify, than to actually do the work.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t all sunshine and kittens when it came to overclocking with our initial board. From the results below, you can see that the ASRock X570 Creator was able to deliver, eventually. But the road to 4.2GHz was a rocky one on our initial board. My initial results were not that great, with overclocking leading to massive instability. Even when dropping back to stock settings, the system wouldn’t behave.
To make a long story short, sometime during our testing, either from overclocking or just general use, by chance, our particular motherboard went misbehaving. This is ultimately what delayed this review which was planned to go out much sooner and why all the testing was done on the Windows 10 build prior to 2004. We reached out to ASRock and they sent us a return label for the misbehaving motherboard and got us out a new replacement X570 Creator fairly quickly with no fuss. This fixed our problem, the replacement motherboard then worked perfectly.
This obviously required a new round of stability testing, Performance at stock speeds was spot-checked and everything was the same. I proceeded to overclock testing, which allowed me to very easily reach 4.2GHz with the new motherboard.
As you can see above, the ASRock X570 Creator achieved a result of 4.2GHz @1.35v. This required almost no tuning or adjustment to achieve. As a result, I think the X570 Creator is a good overclocker. It has tons of options and is generally well made. Aside from the initial overclocking fiasco that may have killed the first one, I had no issues with tuning or anything else.
Final Points
I haven’t touched an ASRock board in a very long time. As a result, I wasn’t sure what to expect with the ASRock X570 Creator motherboard. ASRock is well known for offering more features for the money, and that’s what it has done here. Similar feature sets would typically require $50-$100 more from other brands. The feature set is close to what the MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE has, but costs over $100 less. Of course, there are reasons this is the case.
ASRock doesn’t offer the fancy packaging or bundled extras that MSI did on the GODLIKE. The PCB is high quality but doesn’t use as many layers as some options do. ASRock skipped the dual BIOS ROMs and went with a more conventional VRM design than say GIGABYTE would have. All of these choices allow for savings while still delivering a high-end motherboard and a matching feature set. ASRock actually passes the savings onto the consumer, and thus, charges a bit less than ASUS, GIGABYTE or MSI would.
ASRock didn’t do anything extremely innovative here. It’s just a solid motherboard that works. It does everything it’s supposed to and does it well. Aside from the aforementioned overclocking issue, I had zero trouble with this motherboard when testing its various features. Given the number of features, often some quirk rears its ugly head during testing but that didn’t happen here. ASRock has put together a great motherboard with a lot of features. It’s not a value option in the traditional sense until you compare it with some of the other expensive options out there.
As for the initial board being defective, I’ll chalk that up to dumb luck. Every company ships a bad board from time to time. I’ve seen one or two from every other manufacturer and as a result, I can’t really hold it against ASRock. The second one performed flawlessly when overclocked, so the first one seems like a genuine fluke. As a result, I think the ASRock X570 Creator Motherboard deserves our silver award.
While it is temporarily out of stock at Newegg, you can find it there normally for $499.99 and that is a good price for this motherboard with this feature set. At that price and features, this motherboard is worth your time if you searching for a good X570 motherboard that is feature-rich.
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