Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsGreat motherboard, terrible audio.
Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2017
Audio crackle!
I've had no other problems with this motherboard after a month or so, but the sound crackles constantly when using 3.5mm on the back of the motherboard. I thought I had solved it by simply using the front panel 3.5mm, but I discovered that it starts to crackle every now and again at higher volumes.
Which is unfortunate because the audio otherwise sounds great. There was a noticeable difference in quality between this board and my last board.
I'm using the latest version of the bios and all software at the time of this review.
UPDATE, 3/12/17; The audio cuts out intermittently and seemingly at random. The audio device will disable itself, then re-enable itself and sometimes cycle through this process multiple times and will continue doing so at random intervals until the PC is reset. This is almost a daily occurrence, but sometimes it's not. It's absolutely random. I didn't have this problem with my other setup, so I strongly believe it's the board itself. After reinstalling Windows 10 (twice) to see if that would fix this problem, the sound crackling issue when using the rear panel has also worsened as well. It's now totally unusable. I've had to purchase an audio card, which will hopefully resolve this issue.
I've also had issues with the lighting software being unresponsive and occasionally freezing my PC.
I can't in good conscious recommend this board until either an update is released to fix these issue or a revised version of the board itself is available. Having these problems across three separate and fully clean installs is pretty unacceptable. I would otherwise rate this board as being 5/5. It's beautiful, has plenty of features, OC's very easily and well... I have no complaints at all, otherwise. Unfortunate.
