ASRock X570 PG Velocita Motherboard Review

1. Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing
2. Packaging, Accessories, and Overview
3. UEFI, Software and Test System
4. WPrime, Cinebench and AIDA64
5. Unigine and UL Benchmarks
6. System I/O Benchmarks and Power Consumption
7. Overclocking, Thermals and Final Thoughts

TweakTown's Rating: 95%

The Bottom Line

ASRock's X570 PG Velocita takes down the cost of entry for gamers wanting to build a legit AMD Zen 3 system without sacrificing quality or features!

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

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For gamers that don't go with an enthusiast-level Taichi or Extreme4 motherboard platform, ASRock offers a third option in its portfolio. PG or Phantom Gaming has been extremely popular and quite reliable with a BOM that most often resembles a Taichi motherboard offering. With the PG Velocita, we have an updated platform for the AMD Ryzen 5000 series that includes a more robust set of power stages for VCore and SoC, along with feature upgrades we will go over below.

Additional updates include upgrading the networking to the Killer E3100 and AX1650, the same setup we had on the Razer Edition X570 Taichi last month. This positions the PG Velocita on par with the Phantom Gaming X and, in some cases, better if you take advantage of available software.

Specifications and Marketing

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Running through the specification, the PG Velocita is built on the X570 chipset from AMD and features a 14 phase (6x2)(1x2) power design using Vishay stages. This board supports AMD Ryzen 3000 and 5000 series processors with a four-slot memory interface that can reach upwards of 5000MHz+.

The expansion includes 2x PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, both reinforced with steel shielding. 3x PCIe 4.0 x1 slots complement the board and allow additional expansion, including Thunderbolt 3 with the available header. 8x SATA 6GB/s ports and 2x Hyper m.2 ports support a solid storage array, while networking is easily handled by the Killer E3100 and AX1650.

Audio is handled by the Realtek ALC1220 with a NE5532 Amplifier.

Pricing

The ASRock X570 PG Velocita carries an MSRP of $269.99 with a three-year warranty.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$159.00	$159.00	$159.00	$171.81	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 4/19/2024 at 4:16 am CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission.

Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

Packaging and Accessories

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Packaging gets an upgraded PG design with extremely colorful box art.

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The box's rear offers board specifications along with an I/O overview and features listed to the right.

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Included in the box, we have a quick install guide in several languages and a software setup guide. Additionally, you get a sticker pack, Velcro cable ties, and driver CD.

ASRock X570 PG Velocita Overview

Above, we have both sides of the board, the back being mostly clean apart from a few power doublers at the top. The board's face carries a matte black PCB, black caps, and overall dark heat sink design. There are no logos on the board with branding coming from the silkscreened model on the PCB.

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Getting in closer, the PG Velocita does offer two Hyper M.2 slots that support PCIe 4.0. Both slots are covered by integrated heat sinks. Additional expansion comes from 2x PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, the second having the thunderbolt header right below for convenience. Front panel audio, RGB, and USB 2.0 headers can be found along the bottom edge of the board with debug and power on/off and reset farther to the right.

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Wrapping around the corner, you will run into 8x SATA ports with a USB 3.0 front panel header on either side.

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Further up the line, you will find the USB 3.2 Gen 2 header and the 24-pin power connection.

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Along the top of the board, we have ARGB and RGB headers, 2x fan connections, and the 4-pin and 8-pin CPU power connections.

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Rear I/O is pretty well stacked, Wi-Fi antenna connections at the top followed by DP and HDMI if you happen to be running a process with integrated graphics. We then move into a host of USB 3.2 connections, the darker blue being Gen 1 and lighter Gen 2.

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The heat sink system for the PG Velocita is a four-piece design, with the VRM having a heat pipe connecting the two solutions.

PCB and Circuit Analysis

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Diving into the power design, we start with 14 Vishay SIC654 Power Stages offering 50A current output. These are similar to the SIC634 used in the original X570 Taichi, but with added technologies including OCP and OTP. ASRock is using ISL6617A doublers found on the back of the board and a Renesas RAA 229004 PWM controller.

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Under the fanned heat sink, you will find the AMD X570 chipset.

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Previously, I mentioned a few ICs were found on the rear of the board. Above, we have the ASMedia 1543 USB 3.2 controller that handles the rear I/O.

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Audio CODEC is the ALC1220 from Realtek with an added N5532 amp to the left.

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Nuvoton 6796D has been brought in to handle Super I/O.

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The Killer E3100G can be found on the back of the board.

UEFI, Software and Test System

UEFI

The setup offers the traditional Phantom Gaming aesthetic to the BIOS. The main menu provides a quick overview of the installed CPU and memory, while OC Tweaker brings overclocking options for CPU, memory, Infinity Fabric, and PCIe.

The advanced menu holds most of your basic menu options, including onboard device configuration. The tools menu includes support for RGB LED setup without the need for software. You can also use Easy RAID, SSD Secure Erase, and NVMe Sanitize to manage your storage. Instant flash is available to update your BIOS.

Software

Multiple pieces of software support the X570 PG Velocita; the first we will look at is Killer Control Center.

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With the inclusion of the Killer E3100 LAN and AX1650 Wi-Fi, you get the full benefit with Killer Control Center. This includes a superior QoS suite along with technologies like Killer Xtend and Doubleshot Pro.

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ASRock Motherboard Utility allows nearly full on overclocking from within Windows 10. It does offer several presets on the main screen seen above.

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Once you switch over to OC Tweaker, you have full voltage and clock control.

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Another great feature is the ability to tune your chassis and cooling fans to the motherboard.

Test System

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Sabrent has been a fantastic vendor to work with over the last year, and they continue to support AMD motherboard testing with their Rocket4 Plus built on the Phison E18 platform.

• Motherboard: ASRock X570 PG Velocita (buy from Amazon)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (buy from Amazon)
• RAM: ADATA XPG 2x16GB Spectrix (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: EKWB Quantum Power 360 (buy from Amazon)
• OS Storage: Sabrent Rocket4 Plus NVMe 4.0 (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: Corsair RM750 (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)

WPrime, Cinebench and AIDA64

WPrime

WPrime is a leading multi-threaded benchmark. In our setup, we will manually set the number of cores for the CPU under test. The ROG Crosshair VIII Hero is our baseline motherboard for all charts.

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Adding the X570 PG Velocita, we find 2.61 seconds for 32m and 63.25 for 1024m.

CPUz Bench

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CPUz bench has been added to our reviews as a simple bench to tune your system. For the PG Velocita, we grabbed a score of 662 single thread and 6720 for multi-thread.

Cinebench

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that has been heavily relied upon by both Intel and AMD to showcase their newest platforms during unveils. The benchmark has two tests, a single-core workload that will utilize one thread or 1T. There is also a multi-threaded test which uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU

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Cinebench testing has been moved to R23, and having tested all of our past boards, the PG Velocita grabs 1586 single-core and 15643 multi-thread.

RealBench

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Realbench uses both video and photo workloads to benchmark your CPU. We use the Heavy Multitasking workload in this setup. The PG grabbed a time of 31.06 seconds.

AIDA64 Memory

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AIDA64 has stayed as our means of testing memory bandwidth. The PG Velocita reaches 50928 read, 28744 write, and 49566 copy.

Unigine and UL Benchmarks

PCMark 10

PCMark is a benchmark from UL and tests various workload types to represent typical workloads for a PC. Everything from video conferencing, image import, and editing, along with 3D rendering, are tested.

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Focusing on workload scores, we find the PG reaching 13712 in Digital Content, the highest we have seen to date.

Unigine Superposition

Superposition from Unigine is a DX12 based benchmark. We test with the 720p LOW preset as this removes all but the most basic GPU loading, with all of the FPS coming from the CPU.

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The PG Velocita comes in at 311.44 FPS, a bit lower than most boards tested.

3DMark Timespy

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Timespy shows solid results with 16884 overall, again the highest we have seen. CPU shows 12331.

3DMark Firestrike

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PG Velocita touches a combined score of 15944 in Firestrike. The breakdown gives a CPU score of just over 30k and GPU at 42k.

Horizon Zero Dawn and Gears Tactics

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Running through some real gaming scenarios, Horizon shows 181 FPS for the Velocita. Gears Tactics shows 167.9 FPS on par with previous boards tested.

System I/O Benchmarks and Power Consumption

System I/O Benchmarks

Storage with CrystalDiskMark

Storage tests are all handled by our Sabrent Rocket4 Plus NVMe 4.0 SSD for internal testing and our WD_BLACK P50 for external testing.

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Hitting the lone USB-C port on the PG Velocita, we come away with 1030 MB/s read and 942 MB/s write.

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We went back and retested all of our boards with the new Rocket4 Plus. The PG Velocita held up providing 6992 MB/s read and 5281 MB/s write.

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Random performance 4KQ1 touches 70 MB/s read and 200 MB/s write.

Networking with iPerf

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Wired and Wireless throughput on the PG Velocita reached 2351Mbps for the Killer E3100 and 1373Mbps for the AX1650.

Power Consumption

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Power consumption was in line with expectations for the Velocita. 152w at idle, 336 for CPU load, and 611 during our gaming session.

Overclocking, Thermals and Final Thoughts

Overclocking

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Overclocking on the PG Velocita.

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The voltage required to hit 4.7GHz stable on the PG Velocita was 1.28v in BIOS and under load produced 1.22v.

Thermals

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Thermals were quite good with the Velocita, 29 idle and 78 load during testing.

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I changed the thermal imager to use a larger contrast in colors to better show the hotspots. As you can see, we have a large concentration of heat around the CPU socket; lower left reaching 43c.

Final Thoughts

The PG Velocita was a fantastic board to work with, with no setup or testing issues. A few features that make this solution stand out include its support of proper "gaming" networking with the inclusion of Killer E3100 and AX1650 and support for Thunderbolt 3 via header and the R2.0 AIC.

Proper power stages have been implemented for Zen 3 with this board. The SIC654 is among the best 50A solutions available with OCP and OTP protections. The 6x2 design gives a total of 600A for the CPU.

What We Like

Thunderbolt: This has been a feature hard to come by with AMD platforms. ASRock continues its support of Thunderbolt with an internal header for its Titan Ridge AIC.

Killer Networks: The inclusion of E3100+AX1650 gives this board amazing networking capabilities.

Strong VRM: With over 600A of current capability, the VRM is supremely overbuilt to handle overclocking, even with 5950X!

What Could Be Better

Internal USB Headers: ASRock almost perfected this board but left attention to detail with the internal USB headers. I would certainly like to see all of these headers angled to allow for cleaner installation in a chassis.