Battle of the X670E Flagships: Testing MSI, Asus and Gigabyte’s Best

No one loves the fact that motherboard prices keep going up (except probably the motherboard makers themselves). But there’s no denying that flagship boards still pack in the most complete and most interesting collection of features, along with high-end specs in an attempt to draw in those looking for the best of the best to build their new system around. And with AMD’s new Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs arriving with impressive performance, it’s likely that more people will be looking to build rigs based around AMD’s X670E chipset.

So here we’ll be looking at a few flagship AMD boards from Asus, Gigabyte and MSI. Similar to our Z790 flagship roundup on the Intel side, we’ll detail three (of four) flagship motherboards from the B670E platform. We’ll test and discuss the MSI X670E Godlike ($1,299), Asus Crosshair X670E Extreme ($999), and the Gigabyte X670E Aorus Xtreme in detail, and also cover the notably less expensive (but flagship nonetheless) ASRock X670E Taichi ($479.99). All boards offer a premium appearance, overkill power delivery, PCIe 5.0 slots, and M.2 sockets. Are any of these worth the price? Of these, which should you choose?

The biggest difference between these boards is the price. From the sub-$500 Taichi to the nearly $1300 Godlike, there’s a huge gap from least to most expensive. The problem (for the consumer) is that aside from just price, there isn’t a $700 difference between them on any front, including performance. While some VRMs are better, even the worst (and I use that term loosely) easily handles the Ryzen 9 7950X without issue. It comes down to how many and what speed M.2 sockets you desire, if you’re OK with last-gen flagship class audio or your want the latest and greatest, and finally, 40 Gbps USB ports.