Aorus X370 Gaming 5 or Gaming K5?

thx for the quick answer, I guess I will get the K5 then.

I have Gaming 5 and do not recommend it at all.

My CPU is Ryzen 7 1700 with stock (LED )cooler and RAM is 2 x Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400 ( it is on QVL list) and GPU is RX 460 4GB. It is connected to 850 watt Thermaltake PSU and housed in a Zalman Z12 Plus case. My HDD's are connected through a 4-bay IcyDock 2.5" hot-swap HDD cage which I installed on a 5.25 drive bay on my case. Basically, I should not have any reason to open the side panel of the case ever again.

Theroretically the Ryzen 7 1700 is supported with BIOS F3 ( original BIOS the motherboard came with), now I am running on latest BIOS F5 ( Agesa 1.0.0.4.a )

The problem is this damn thing freezes and gets stuck on an undocumented BIOS POST code. Does it freeze on Windows ? No. This damn thing freezes when you enter BIOS. I enter BIOS, click on a few arrow keys to move around it and baaamm... it freezes. When it freezes, it stays so, restarting does not help, shutting down and restartign does not help etc. I shut it down, wait for 5 minutes, then it starts to run.
... .

@Redraid3r : I was about to post an answer to your post, but then remembered how flame wars on forums start and get out of control.

I am happy that you got lucky somehow and somehow you also keep recommending a board by a company that wrecks something working while trying to improve it after you have experienced this first hand.

May better days be coming for you and your system.

Best Regards

As for my part, I bought the Gaming 5 and I have experienced no problems what so ever. I put together my system, consisting of a Ryzen 5 1600 and 16 gb of Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000 and everything worked just fine, right from the beginning. Even my memory runs at 2933 Mhz by just selecting the XMP-Profile in the UEFI without any further tuning. I am still using the F4 BIOS, since I do not have any problems and therefore I have no reason to update it.

So I, for my part, would buy this board definitely again, because it has great features for a fairly reasonable price in my opinion. There might be some issues, but since I have not experienced any so far, I cannot complain at all.
Additional, as mentioned above, I think such problems are part of the risk you take, for buying something absolutely new and basically not really tested. Everything comes at a price and as I see it, this is the price you might have to pay, if you jump on a completely new plattform.

Then you might find this thread and the second reply to it interesting : http://forum.gigabyte.us/thread/886/am4-beta-bios-thread

I have Gaming 5 and do not recommend it at all.

My CPU is Ryzen 7 1700 with stock (LED )cooler and RAM is 2 x Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400 ( it is on QVL list) and GPU is RX 460 4GB. It is connected to 850 watt Thermaltake PSU and housed in a Zalman Z12 Plus case. My HDD's are connected through a 4-bay IcyDock 2.5" hot-swap HDD cage which I installed on a 5.25 drive bay on my case. Basically, I should not have any reason to open the side panel of the case ever again.

Theroretically the Ryzen 7 1700 is supported with BIOS F3 ( original BIOS the motherboard came with), now I am running on latest BIOS F5 ( Agesa 1.0.0.4.a )

The problem is this damn thing freezes and gets stuck on an undocumented BIOS POST code. Does it freeze on Windows ? No. This damn thing freezes when you enter BIOS. I enter BIOS, click on a few arrow keys to move around it and baaamm... it freezes. When it freezes, it stays so, restarting does not help, shutting down and restartign does not help etc. I shut it down, wait for 5 minutes, then it starts to run.

It has lots of fancy features for sure. The On/Off button, CMOS clear button, OC button, restart button located at the top right and 7 point POST LED display in bottom left are very helpful if you build assemble your motherboard by placing the CPU and RAM AND IF YOU POWER IT UP BEFORE YOU INSTALL IT ON YOUR CASE. After you install it on your case and close the side panels, they are useless.

I had read Ryzen had issues and deduced that I needed a CMOS Clear button. But a Clear CMOS button is useless unless you can use it without opening your case, and some Asus motherboards do have them located on the back panel of motherboard - but god, they are expensive. I had two alternatives MSI Carbon Pro or this one. I selected this one for the presence of Clear CMOS key only. And it turned out to be useless.

Another thing I constantly experience is the motherboard freezes and displays a POST message "b4 : USB device hot plug-in" . Did you understand what the problem is? I did not either.

Not only are the BIOS POST code definitions are cryptic and useless, they are not readable at all. Some error codes displayed on motherboards bottom left corner is not even documented even like this. And after two weeks, I still can not figure out what the displayed code is, from my chair I incline a bit down and can see some lights which are obstructed by the GPU ! So I push the case a bit to the right, incline a bit more downwards, and there I see something unrecognizable. Why ? Because instead of a LCD display, there is a regular POST LED installed. So I see something, I try to deduce what it looks like ( the POST documentation in manual lists them as "B4" but what I can see is something like this: https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS0mFagkfVvLpNrdHxni3gitoJb-OyVv9MniXP-mtZmVyUz3lbm I am not even sure about the orientation of the code; I just know that I am looking at it from top. Does it display b4 or something like Ah ?

In times like this, I want to get a big axe and storm into Gigabyte R&D department and hack those idiots. And believe me, this happens everyday and I get the urge every day.

The main m.2 socket - where you will put your precious, highly expensive NVMe drive is located exactly under your GPU slot, you can not see the slot at all let alone change it without removing the GPU. You might not see this in pictures, or heck even if you have the board in your hands you might not visualize this. It is not easy to imagine how it will look like with the GPU installed. Well, almost all GPU's starting with RX 460 and GTX 1050 are dual socket GPUs - meaning they not only cover their own slot, but also the slot below them too. Which happens to be the exact place where main m.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drive is supposed to go in.

NVMe drives tend to get very hot, and those idiots decided to put them just beneath another very hot component. So, I did not risk my NVMe drive at all; I will need to order some third party passive m.2 cooler before doing that. In times like this, I again want to get an axe and...

This applies to all motherboards - Intel and AMD alike : There are lots of ports, but as it happens, a port being there and having a working, compatible device to go in that port, and putting the device into that port and making all connections.. does not mean it will work. Somehow, things like PCIe lanes come into play.

For example, if you put a PCIex4 device in a specific x16 port, all three PCIe x1 ports become unavailable. If you connect a SATA m.2 drive into main m.2 slot, SATA 3 port ( there are 8 ports, 0 to 7 ) becomes unavailable. If you manage to get a U.2 NVMe drive and connect it to its U.2 port, the main m.2 port becomes unavailable and so on. Lots of limitations are there.

Now, I love this motherboards features :

- You might not care about LED lighting ( I certainly hated the idea ), but if you have a case with a glass sidepanel or with a mesh top, you will start caring. LED lighting is much more likeable than I imagined. But, beware - you can set different areas of motherboard in different colors - but you can not set CPU cooler LED color. Somehow, it is set automatically based on god knows what. For example, as shipped motherbaord had LED colors set to red, and CPU cooler LED color was dark green - why, god knows. Since my case was shipped with two case fans with blue LED's, I set all motherboard LED's to blue as well; now the CPU cooler LED color is a very faint orange. Why, god knows.

- There are 8 SATA ports, and they are very important to me. If I ever get my hands on a U.2 drive, I can try it as well.

- It is beautiful to look at.

Shit... I recongized that the only reason I have to keep this board is that I can not give it back.

I wish I had purchased MSI X370 Carbon Pro. Sure, it would have its problems and I would need to short some pins to clear CMOS ( Gaming 5 has one of them too ) but at least its main m.2 location was not exactly beneath the GPU slot.

To sum up: unless you need this as a test bed like I do, stay away from it. .

Particularly: "To sum up: unless you need this as a test bed like I do, stay away from it. ."

No, stay away from the F5 BIOS and I bet most of your complaints would be solved, especially the BIOS freezing problem that seems to be irritating you the most.

I have the Gigabyte AX370 Gaming 5 and I would HIGHLY recommend it. The Killer NIC is great, the feature I have enjoyed the most and the lights are fun and look great. Games look great too, and are real smooth. But, um, that's what BIOS updates are for, to fix BIOS problems. You act like you have no other options when you do. I have found the F5 BIOS isn't very good, so you know what, I backed down to F4 BIOS, which you act like you can't do, and all is fine. There is nothing that says you MUST use the latest BIOS. Most AM4 motherboards have BIOS issues at some point since it is so new. So contrary to what you imply, these Gigabyte motherboards are not unique. Although I do think MSI is on the ball better than most concerning Ryzen, but there will be new BIOSes for the Gaming 5 and that can fix problems. You can get a new BIOS, but you can't add features to your motherboard, EVER. MSI just basically has two models, the Carbon and the Titanium, one a midrange board and the other an extreme high end with nothing in between, which the Carbon is too mediocre in features and the Titanium is too expensive. You get the Carbon, and you are stuck with either a mediocre motherboard or an expendable motherboard because you will need to get something else if you want more features than what the Carbon has.

I highly recommend the Gigabyte X370 Gaming 5 even though I tried the F5 BIOS and then tried to get my Trident Z memory from New Egg to run at it's rated speed of 3200 Mhz and 15 CAS, like it was doing with the F4 BIOS, by XMP Profile 1, and when it rebooted, nothing. Ryzen is NOT for beginners, and the way it sounds, not for you, because you can't handle a few challenges and you gotta be ready to have your troubleshooting skills tested and be ready to get into the case and move things around and DON'T GIVE UP! But it sounds like you want everything to be near perfect.

But I got mine working again after updating to F5, even though I did think the motherboard was toast or the memory got toasted. For some reason, the BIOS reset didn't fix the memory issue, reset it to a memory speed it could handle with F5. I had to take the memory out of slots 1 and 3 and put one in slot 2 and it booted after trying all sorts of ways to reset the BIOS enough for it to work. But it did boot fine when I moved the memory out of 1 and 3 slots and one stick into slot 2, booted into Windows, reflashed back to F4 and now all is good in the world, with the memory back in slots 1 and 3, back to where I started with the lesson learned of DON'T USE THE F5 BIOS! Wait until they come out with F6 and see if that is better than F4.