Overclocking

We made some tentative moves with overclocking, but despite the boards lowly cooling and power delivery compared to other boards we've tested recently, it hit the same 4.3GHz all-core overclock as far more expensive boards, so if you plan on bumping up those frequencies with your Ryzen 5 3600, there's certainly some promise here.

Performance Analysis 

Single-threaded performance in Cinebench was a touch slower than it was on the two best-performing boards on test, as was the overclocked result, and the multi-threaded scores maybe hinted at a touch of reduced boosting, but this only lost the board one or two percent at most. In Blender, it was actually marginally quicker than those boards, but again by very small amounts.

With every board that comes into our lab, BIOS versions are maturing, so we expect to see improvements, and that's likely a contributing factor here. However, the X570-A Pro matched its own more expensive sibling in Far Cry 5, not losing any performance to the better results we've seen, and it also topped the 3DMark Time Spy test.

Audio performance was average, though, with the Prestige X570 Creation offering significantly better results in the noise level and dynamic range tests.

If you plan on using a PCIe 4.0 SSD with its included heatsink, you'll be losing nothing here, with solid numbers using our Aorus PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Conclusion

Let's start with those VRM temperatures. They're not great, but the X570-A Pro nonetheless coped fine with our Ryzen 9 3900X; MSI has definitely cut back quite heavily on VRM, chipset, and M.2 cooling here but not to a degree that proves problematic. We'll still restate our concerns about applying hefty overclocks and suggest that the board is likely better-suited to AMD's six- and eight-core 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs than its 12- and 16-core monsters, but if you're happy with a stock speed CPU and just want to get on the PCIe 4.0 bandwagon, then the MSI X570-A Pro has everything you need to build a decent X570 system, and you don't need to worry about its chipset fan being too noisy or whiny either.