Pros: - Affordable - Fast boost clocks - 65W, efficient. Runs relatively cool (compared to its sister chips), enough to be handled by an air cooler. (I used a Noctua NH-U12S Redux.)

Cons: - Wish I knew how to push it even faster.

Overall Review: This CPU is a great value. Honestly, unless you're a content creator, unlikely you need more than six cores. I can't even get this thing to break a sweat in productivity (I work from home) and games. Highly recommend. My chip has no problems running PBO +200MHz above stock boost clock, while at -30 (max) undervolt via Curve Optimizer. Additional random thing: at stock OCCT would throw all kinds of CPU errors, but after using the Curve Optimizer undervolt... no errors anymore? I mean, I'm confused, but I'm not complaining... NOTE THOUGH: The first one I got (online) was faulty. Probably just bad luck. But if your computer randomly resets, has memory errors (but none while using MemTest86 at stock), or ever freezes in the BIOS, return the chip and try again. I wasted so much time returning motherboards and RAM kits and switching up power supplies when it was the chip all along. Got my second chip from NewEgg and it worked fine.

Pros: - I liked the look, feel, ports, functionality, you name it. Decent entry board.

Cons: - Unacceptable high-pitched coil whine from VRMs when running in XMP. Maybe I got a dud, but others have reported this is a semi-common thing.

Overall Review: Good board, but I can't accept coil whine, especially for this amount of money. I'm out.

Pros: - Decent quality - Super stable - Impressively carefully packaged (lots of foam, thick box) - Plenty of config options, connectors - PCIe x5.0 - RGB

Cons: - PCIe slot coil whine (and only one slot) - Absurdly expensive, as AM5 seems to go these days - As seems common, gimmicky motherboard bloatware junk software on mobo website available with drivers. - Can these Chinese companies get a single native English speaker to translate their documentation or write software UI? It's embarrassing.

Overall Review: Settled on this board after trying a few others. (All the while, it was my CPU that was faulty.) After trying two different GPUs and two different PSUs, I've concluded that my specimen has PCIe x16 slot coil whine, or something like it on the board itself. Which means I only hear it when gaming really, and at that point I have headphones on so it's alright (undervolting also helps too), so I'll keep it I guess. Sigh. But double check yours doesn't have it before you settle. For the prices these days, nobody should be putting up with coil whine.