ITX boards, Monterey compatibility

[atanvarno]

I've been fed-up with ASRock ACPI for a while and was considering moving to something else. But never got around it since it worked good enough until now, when it became apparent that SmallTree is dead in the water and my X570 ITX/TB3 uses I211-AT.

• MSI is a no-go due to their BIOS shenanigans with X570.
• Also no-go are any boards that use LAN chips covered exclusively by SmallTree kext.
• I am looking at ITX boards exclusively as all cases are ITX

I looked at Asus and Gigabyte and oh boy - is there a price difference.

• B450 ITX are 108€ for Gigabyte and 170€ for Asus here in Serbia
• Gigabyte X570 is 200-210€ while Strix is 280-310€
• Gigabyte is also the only company that has X570S board which is welcome improvement (same as X570 but improved thermals)

However, the only Asus board that does not have I211 is their B550 board – it has I225-V.
Gigabyte boards are less clear in the spec list, still checking what exactly are they using. B550 has Realtek 2.5G while X570S is Intel 2.5G. Regular X570 just says Intel 1G which could very well be 211-AT too.

I'm attaching comparison PDFs.

Any info / recommendations are welcome.

 

[atanvarno]

And here's the whole heap of discussion around I225-V issue too.

LAN/WiFi/Bt is the major hurdle in our little garden, isn't it...

 

[Aluveitie]

I started using a QNAP QNA-UC5G1T (see my thread Using 5Gbit/s USB-to-Ethernet dongles). It has been working fairly reliable for me on Monterey since July. (You can also use much cheaper 1GBit/s dongles working OOB).

In the earliest Betas I've used KVM/QEMU to run Monterey, which allows to use a virtual NIC to bypass the SmallTree issues. So virtualization would be another alternative to using a dongle.

I had the ASRock X570 PG ITX, and I found paying the higher price for the Asus Strix X570-I was well worth it. Asus has a more mature/sane BIOS and some useful features (temp sensor header, 2 M.2 slots, POST leds). Also the build quality seems much better, switching out the AX200 was easier than on the ASRock. Also the Strix has active VRM cooling, which might be helpful for overclocking or running a 5950X in a SFF case with restricted airflow.

The X570S on the other hand is just a marketing gimmick, X570S just a X570 with a different label. The only difference is AMD lowering cooling requirements, even on older X570 the fan was rarely needed. It was more of a precautionary measure. The fan on the ASRock X570 PG ITX was annoyingly loud without a manual fan curve, the Strix X570-I has two fans and I can't remember ever hearing them.

The only advantage of X570S boards is an updated feature set, like 2.5 GBit/s NIC and occasionally USB 3.2 gen 2x2 support.

 

[atanvarno]

Thanks for the tip, will certainly look to that thread. Never really considered USB options before.

Speaking of WiFi — it seems AMD decided to produce its own WiFi module and it X570SI board rev 1.1 from Gigabyte uses it. It seems actual hardware is made my Mediatek. Specs do look amazing; if they could bother to produce macOS drivers, would be just dandy.