**Review: The Kingston KC2500 Motherboard - A Budget-Friendly Option with Some Complications**

I recently had the opportunity to review the Kingston KC2500 motherboard, which is an affordable option for those looking to build a gaming PC without breaking the bank. As I began setting up my system, everything seemed normal at first. However, things took a turn for the worse when my camera ran out of storage, followed by my other camera and microphone losing power. It was as if the program had decided to malfunction, causing all sorts of issues.

**A Sudden Malfunction**

I must admit that I was quite disappointed with the way my system started acting up, but fortunately, the Cinebench score came in within normal expectations, showing that the CPU performance was indeed on par. However, this was not enough to save me from further complications. When testing out PCI Gen 3 performance using an NVMe SSD and an adapter, I noticed that everything was working smoothly until we moved to the Samsung 980 Pro as our boot drive. To my surprise, we were getting PCI Gen 4 performance in terms of read speeds, but write speeds were consistently lower than expected.

**PCIe Issues and Buggy System**

This led me to suspect that there might be a bug within the system, particularly with regards to the motherboard. I began to question whether some of these issues were related to the motherboard, such as Wi-Fi connectivity problems. While the RAM did seem to receive an update, which helped improve performance, I'm still uncertain about the overall reliability and compatibility of this board.

**A Motherboard That Balances Features and Price**

One of my main concerns was the trade-off between features and price. The Kingston KC2500 seems to have sacrificed some aspects in favor of a lower cost, particularly when it comes to Wi-Fi connectivity. While I appreciate that certain updates have been implemented, I'm not entirely convinced about the long-term viability of this motherboard.

**A Suitable Option for Those on a Budget**

That being said, if you're looking to build a gaming PC without breaking the bank, the Kingston KC2500 is certainly worth considering. Its CPU performance is respectable, and it does seem to pair well with the RTX 360 Ti. However, I would caution against purchasing this motherboard if you plan on using high-end hardware or upgrading in the future. Instead, be aware of its limitations and potential compatibility issues.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, my experience with the Kingston KC2500 motherboard has been a mixed bag. While it does offer some great features at an affordable price point, there are also several complications and potential bugs that need to be addressed. If you're looking for a budget-friendly option without sacrificing too much performance, this board may be worth considering. However, if you prioritize long-term reliability and compatibility, you might want to explore other options.

**Recommendation**

As I mentioned earlier, the Kingston KC2500 is an affordable option that balances features and price. If you're interested in learning more about current pricing, you can find my Amazon affiliate links listed below. Additionally, I highly recommend checking out Netgear's Nighthawk Mesh system, which offers incredible Wi-Fi coverage even in larger homes.

**Disclaimer**

I would like to thank Kingston for providing me with this review sample. Your support allows me to create content like this, so please smash that like button and get subscribed if you want to see more reviews like this in the future!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everybody and welcome to a super special and actually ridiculously interesting video today which i know is a bold statement because we're talking about a motherboard something i don't know that isn't the most exciting thing in the world but the reason that this video is different is because this is a b550 motherboard which as we know can tend to get quite expensive these days but this costs around about 110 pounds which makes it the cheapest b550 motherboard you can buy so the question is buy it or don't i was gonna say buy it or should you that doesn't make any sense netgear's nighthawk mesh is on a mission to end wi-fi woes once and for all if you're someone with a lot of devices then this awesome kit has everything you need to get started it uses the super speedy wi-fi six technology to deliver the fastest speeds to all your connected devices of today and tomorrow there's four times more capacity and is 100 backwards compatible with all your current devices check it out and learn a little bit more down with that link below so let's do a little unboxing then of a motherboard i know incredibly exciting stuff you're going to get things like an io shield in here because obviously it's a very budget board but importantly this one actually comes with wi-fi there are two variants one has ac wi-fi and one doesn't and the thing is when it comes to motherboards they never translate into better gaming performance i mean you know i'm sure there might be a couple of frames here and there between something that's ridiculously high-end and something that isn't but i mean no one's gonna upgrade their motherboard for more performance it's not really something i would traditionally worry about the question i have with this board though is more what do you get on it and what are you missing out on because i'm not saying you should go for the cheapest motherboards that you can i'm saying that you should consider the cheapest motherboard and right off the bat i can uh i can already see that this is a little bit different to a normal motherboard there is really not much on that at all i've never seen a motherboard with so little things on it i mean you've got a little bit of sort of heatsink i guess for the vrm but in terms of serious overclocking if you're going to grab something like a 5950x this is probably not going to be the right motherboard for you but in theory it should support it it should work the wi-fi module is literally just that it's a wi-fi module that's installed that's the difference between the ac version and the non-ac but the first thing really that catches my eye is the fact that there is only one pcie ssd slot and the good news is that this is pci gen 4 but if you're going to want to upgrade later i guess you could probably just use an adapter card and put it in these slots assuming that the bandwidth is there but again i don't see why not the chipset itself doesn't actually support gen 4 so if you want to go for multiple gen 4 ssds you're not going to have the flexibility of doing so so while it might not matter at the moment that you only have one slot in the future i would wager that probably will but i mean for the sort of person that's going to be buying this i guess it doesn't really turning to the i o and there's not really that much here i mean again i think for a budget gaming pc this doesn't matter we've got what's that six usb ports on the back so if you're not going to daisy chain things then yes you're probably going to run into some issues at some point but you know you can just get adapters these are usb 3.1 gen 1 by the way not gen 2 so they're not going to be quite as fast as some others but again you know you're sort of getting the theme here this doesn't really matter that is really strange that is really strange it says on the back of the box that it has eight usb 3.2 gen1 but then on the board itself it says here usb 3.2 gen2 something else that might sound a little bit strange is the audio on this board is you're likely to maybe get a little bit of interference i guess and not have the highest quality chip on this board so if you're going to use analog headphones this could affect you but the way around this is just to use like a usb deck or of course usb headphones or headsets or anything like that should solve that problem i'm trying to think of other things really to mention i mean in terms of fan headers how many do we have on here one two three four five six so six actually that's surprising that should be fine i think for pretty much every build was it worth leaving that bit in the video me counting that's the level we've got to on this channel now we don't have any usbc for the front which is hardly surprising but if you're going to get high in case bear this one in mind we do also have addressable rgb and old-school rgb the thing that you do need to be aware of though and something that is very very important i can't stress that enough is that if you have a look nice and close up here it says p 1.1 why does this matter why do you want version 1.2 that's because that is actually when these boards will start to support the latest generation of 5000 series cpus so the significance is that without any way to flash the bias because there's no fancy bios flashback where you can just put a usb drive in and the motherboard itself will flash without needing a processor you're going to have to get an older cpu to actually put in this before you can even use it with one of the newer ryzen chips which is going to be very significant and it is going to catch a lot of people out it is nice that you can see because in theory you could buy it and then return it but i mean that's quite a lot of hassle isn't it but anyway that's exactly why i'm here to give you the lowdown all of that information so you don't make mistakes for yourself and obviously are a little bit more educated i guess when it comes to pc gaming and computers and things so what we're going to do today is actually test this motherboard with what's this a 3600 which is probably what you'd want to pair it with anyway we're going to use an rtx 3060 ti and fundamentally we're also going to use a 980 pro not because i think that this is the right pairing for this motherboard at all i mean completely the opposite really but because this is actually going to be able to test the full bandwidth i guess of the ssd and the board to see if they can communicate as well as some of the higher end boards would and then we're also going to see how it fares with some higher end rams this is 4133mhz ram which is definitely going to throw up a lot of problems and quite a few boards this may well be the same is this board going to be upgradable to a nice high-end rig in the future or is it going to be a little bit limiting let's start with our cpu then shall we by of course dropping it in place with no force while i definitely have seen compatibility issues with ram in this situation it is quite rare these days even on ryzen boards but the problem is that the ram itself has these rated speeds and they have like a memory profile baked in so the motherboard will read that profile if you enable it of course and then it will actually set all of the settings to match up with the ram but the problem is a lot of motherboards especially i imagine this pre-bios update isn't going to like fast ram and it doesn't really quite know how to work i guess in timings and things you enable this profile and then your pc just won't boot and you'll have to reset the cmos which isn't a big deal but it's certainly not very user friendly the thing is though while that will definitely be interesting to test it's not even something i have in my own personal rig because i think 3 600 megahertz at the moment is the not even the sweet spot it's the high-end sweet spot for gaming and cpu performance because anything above that doesn't tend to make too much difference however the ssd i would wage is going to be a little bit more of a big deal because i would wager personally that there are going to be games that will actually require an ssd like this for like the full functionality so if you're finding that you're a little bit limited with your bandwidth while it is probably going to be okay for 95 percent of the games if you're wanting to play like the next next-gen game like i don't know cyberpunk 3077 in 20 years time in the future you might find that it does make a fair old difference the thing that i've just realized as i screw this into place is that actually this ssd costs more than this entire motherboard but by a fair bit it's probably what like 40 more expensive but there you go this is what your completed motherboard combo will look like and as you can see there's really not that much there at all enough mucking about though let's actually get a system built up this is the p500a from fantex but obviously this does have usbc on the front panel which you wouldn't be able to use here come on baby in you go in you go it's not a bad looking motherboard once you've got everything else in there i mean colour scheme wise it's pretty neutral but there's a little bit of accenting going on there which i really like i'm pretty uh pretty vocal these days about how all motherboards tend to look the same but at least you have a little bit of design on here let's move on to the graphics card then shall we and i haven't used this one before this is zotek's 3060 ti this looks small it is small here we go this is actually very different to the uh the 30 70 version of this card i thought it was going to be the same cooler but this is actually nice and neat look this should fit in pretty much all builds really and that should be our rig complete not looking too bad now is it and realistically what i was trying to do is almost create the rig that you might upgrade to later because yes i know it's not really realistic to have like custom cables super high in ram maybe you know like 120 pound watercolor and stuff elgato capture cards but if it can support all of these things in the future then it gives you something to upgrade to and it does i guess give you a nice path to save some money in the first instance but then obviously have something that you can be super proud of in the end game really i mean you could watercolor this if you really wanted to i've never seen a watercolor pc with a 100 pound motherboard before but there's a first time for everything future video idea here we go oh it's doing something the fans are on looking pretty swish we've got some error leds but hopefully those will disappear in just a second i need to plug the monitor in of course i do first boot unsuccessful let's try again so we've got a cpu and dram led lit at the same time so maybe it is just as simple as trying out some new ram i guess i did say i expected it to work first time but i told you the problems do exist let's try some 3200 megahertz vengeance pro i mean if this board doesn't work that would be a complete waste of time wouldn't it oh oh it's doing something there we go aha that looks better it's thinking about it maybe well the lights have gone out but it still says no signal ah hey yes yes see now that is the thing right this is the thing with ryzen honestly it is still a little bit unpredictable when it comes to the first boot so so be calm is my advice somewhat mild panic over there and let's actually have a look at the bios so you can see there you go version 1.1 on the bios ram speed is running at 2133 so a lot lower than its rated one so we have to go into the oc tweaker and actually set that to be its full speed but i want to update this bios actually for a second and we'll go update to hopefully run on version 1.7 let's hope we don't get a power cut let's actually load up this xmp profobo on this vengeance ram and see if we can get this to boot oh we've booted into we've booted into the wrong thing there that's not what i wanted to do at all the wi-fi seems to certainly work as well as we update our nvidia drivers interestingly it does seem that the wifi speed is definitely reduced compared to some of the higher end boards it is indeed i've just tested that computer on the same wi-fi and we're getting about 310 whereas on here we're getting anywhere from around about 70 to 80. you do get some software with this however so here you can see we've got performance mode standard and then power saving we've got a little bit of an oc tweaker as well so you can adjust some of the ryzen settings on the fly which is nice i wouldn't expect to be able to push this that far but it may well be worth a go system information so you can see everything that's going on but then for me it's all about this fan tastic tuning they seem to have understood my sense of humor here there is a fan test that you can just say start and then it will automatically tune everything for you which is pretty good auto apply when the program starts and then it was at this point that everything started to go a little bit wrong i mean i mean everything really my camera decided to run out of storage my other camera decided to run out of battery then my microphone also ran out of battery which is why you've got benchmark markers here today but he sounds a little bit sad i was unable to get the elgato capture card to work but i think that this isn't going to be a bandwidth limitation because i've had this problem on loads of different systems and unfortunately the way i normally get around it is to just move it to a different slot but obviously you can't do that on this board because there aren't any more in terms of things like performance though i was actually very pleasantly surprised because the cinebench score came in pretty much normal exactly what you'd expect which is fantastic and it shows that the cpu performance was performing as it should gaming performance as well you can see here there's some lovely control footage and the rtx 360 ti with this cpu is a perfect pairing like honestly the two works so well together it's not the highest end setup in the world and the cpu might hold you back in some games but for what you're probably going to be using this for honestly it's fantastic really does come highly recommended no issues here it was at this point that i decided to get an adapter out of my draw and another nvme ssd to test out pci gen 3 performance and this was pretty much flawless i mean this is a kc 2500 and we got very good read and write speeds so this was clearly working as intended but then it got even stranger when we moved over to the ssd that was actually our boot drive that samsung 980 pro because we were clearly getting pci gen 4 performance when it comes to the read speeds i mean this blew me away it was pretty much bang on the money but then the write speeds were being very consistently funny i mean way lower than they should be so this is clearly just a bug in the system somewhere but i was unable to fix it i would say that a lot of these problems are down to the motherboard i mean the wi-fi for instance is differently down to the motherboard that's that's silly it's almost not worth having and then just buying something separately but when it comes to the compatibility issues i don't know maybe time will tell that bias update certainly helps the ram but will it help the rest of the system i don't know what this motherboard is all about is to give you all of the features that you need bring the cost as far down as possible and then pretty much chuck everything else out that i don't know some people will have and others won't the main thing is that the cpu support seems to be as good as i could realistically expect in terms of performance i don't think you're going to see a huge difference between this and say like a strix board for instance it's a very good all-round motherboard then just be aware of its limitations mainly being that if you do want to go for 5000 series ryzen you are going to need to have a chip on hand to do the update yourself or find some sort of way around the problem because you know you might find that you get a motherboard and it's just not the right up-to-date bios maybe if you're watching this video in a year or so you'll be more confident in picking it up and thinking that we'll have an up-to-date bios but it is going to be a risk i'd love to hear your thoughts on this one though will we be picking up the super cheap phantom gaming or will you be looking at something else i would absolutely love to hear from you if you do want to check out current pricing you can find that with my amazon affiliate links listed down below and of course while you're down there don't forget to check out netgear's awesome nighthawk mesh with one router and two nodes included in the mk 63 pack you can get incredible wi-fi coverage even with a larger home that's up to 3250 square feet wi-fi 6 manages bandwidth more effectively across all of your devices in the home so you can fire up the tv in the living room the console for kids and then of course the pc and the gaming den all at the same time without too much strain on your network more devices online smoother streaming check out this epic step towards next-gen networking today with that link down below a massive thank you to me for actually supplying this review sample if you like the fact that i can actually spend my own money on making these videos then please smash that like button and get subscribed it makes the world of difference and it genuinely does make videos like this possible so thank you so much for watching i appreciate it i'll see in the next one youhello everybody and welcome to a super special and actually ridiculously interesting video today which i know is a bold statement because we're talking about a motherboard something i don't know that isn't the most exciting thing in the world but the reason that this video is different is because this is a b550 motherboard which as we know can tend to get quite expensive these days but this costs around about 110 pounds which makes it the cheapest b550 motherboard you can buy so the question is buy it or don't i was gonna say buy it or should you that doesn't make any sense netgear's nighthawk mesh is on a mission to end wi-fi woes once and for all if you're someone with a lot of devices then this awesome kit has everything you need to get started it uses the super speedy wi-fi six technology to deliver the fastest speeds to all your connected devices of today and tomorrow there's four times more capacity and is 100 backwards compatible with all your current devices check it out and learn a little bit more down with that link below so let's do a little unboxing then of a motherboard i know incredibly exciting stuff you're going to get things like an io shield in here because obviously it's a very budget board but importantly this one actually comes with wi-fi there are two variants one has ac wi-fi and one doesn't and the thing is when it comes to motherboards they never translate into better gaming performance i mean you know i'm sure there might be a couple of frames here and there between something that's ridiculously high-end and something that isn't but i mean no one's gonna upgrade their motherboard for more performance it's not really something i would traditionally worry about the question i have with this board though is more what do you get on it and what are you missing out on because i'm not saying you should go for the cheapest motherboards that you can i'm saying that you should consider the cheapest motherboard and right off the bat i can uh i can already see that this is a little bit different to a normal motherboard there is really not much on that at all i've never seen a motherboard with so little things on it i mean you've got a little bit of sort of heatsink i guess for the vrm but in terms of serious overclocking if you're going to grab something like a 5950x this is probably not going to be the right motherboard for you but in theory it should support it it should work the wi-fi module is literally just that it's a wi-fi module that's installed that's the difference between the ac version and the non-ac but the first thing really that catches my eye is the fact that there is only one pcie ssd slot and the good news is that this is pci gen 4 but if you're going to want to upgrade later i guess you could probably just use an adapter card and put it in these slots assuming that the bandwidth is there but again i don't see why not the chipset itself doesn't actually support gen 4 so if you want to go for multiple gen 4 ssds you're not going to have the flexibility of doing so so while it might not matter at the moment that you only have one slot in the future i would wager that probably will but i mean for the sort of person that's going to be buying this i guess it doesn't really turning to the i o and there's not really that much here i mean again i think for a budget gaming pc this doesn't matter we've got what's that six usb ports on the back so if you're not going to daisy chain things then yes you're probably going to run into some issues at some point but you know you can just get adapters these are usb 3.1 gen 1 by the way not gen 2 so they're not going to be quite as fast as some others but again you know you're sort of getting the theme here this doesn't really matter that is really strange that is really strange it says on the back of the box that it has eight usb 3.2 gen1 but then on the board itself it says here usb 3.2 gen2 something else that might sound a little bit strange is the audio on this board is you're likely to maybe get a little bit of interference i guess and not have the highest quality chip on this board so if you're going to use analog headphones this could affect you but the way around this is just to use like a usb deck or of course usb headphones or headsets or anything like that should solve that problem i'm trying to think of other things really to mention i mean in terms of fan headers how many do we have on here one two three four five six so six actually that's surprising that should be fine i think for pretty much every build was it worth leaving that bit in the video me counting that's the level we've got to on this channel now we don't have any usbc for the front which is hardly surprising but if you're going to get high in case bear this one in mind we do also have addressable rgb and old-school rgb the thing that you do need to be aware of though and something that is very very important i can't stress that enough is that if you have a look nice and close up here it says p 1.1 why does this matter why do you want version 1.2 that's because that is actually when these boards will start to support the latest generation of 5000 series cpus so the significance is that without any way to flash the bias because there's no fancy bios flashback where you can just put a usb drive in and the motherboard itself will flash without needing a processor you're going to have to get an older cpu to actually put in this before you can even use it with one of the newer ryzen chips which is going to be very significant and it is going to catch a lot of people out it is nice that you can see because in theory you could buy it and then return it but i mean that's quite a lot of hassle isn't it but anyway that's exactly why i'm here to give you the lowdown all of that information so you don't make mistakes for yourself and obviously are a little bit more educated i guess when it comes to pc gaming and computers and things so what we're going to do today is actually test this motherboard with what's this a 3600 which is probably what you'd want to pair it with anyway we're going to use an rtx 3060 ti and fundamentally we're also going to use a 980 pro not because i think that this is the right pairing for this motherboard at all i mean completely the opposite really but because this is actually going to be able to test the full bandwidth i guess of the ssd and the board to see if they can communicate as well as some of the higher end boards would and then we're also going to see how it fares with some higher end rams this is 4133mhz ram which is definitely going to throw up a lot of problems and quite a few boards this may well be the same is this board going to be upgradable to a nice high-end rig in the future or is it going to be a little bit limiting let's start with our cpu then shall we by of course dropping it in place with no force while i definitely have seen compatibility issues with ram in this situation it is quite rare these days even on ryzen boards but the problem is that the ram itself has these rated speeds and they have like a memory profile baked in so the motherboard will read that profile if you enable it of course and then it will actually set all of the settings to match up with the ram but the problem is a lot of motherboards especially i imagine this pre-bios update isn't going to like fast ram and it doesn't really quite know how to work i guess in timings and things you enable this profile and then your pc just won't boot and you'll have to reset the cmos which isn't a big deal but it's certainly not very user friendly the thing is though while that will definitely be interesting to test it's not even something i have in my own personal rig because i think 3 600 megahertz at the moment is the not even the sweet spot it's the high-end sweet spot for gaming and cpu performance because anything above that doesn't tend to make too much difference however the ssd i would wage is going to be a little bit more of a big deal because i would wager personally that there are going to be games that will actually require an ssd like this for like the full functionality so if you're finding that you're a little bit limited with your bandwidth while it is probably going to be okay for 95 percent of the games if you're wanting to play like the next next-gen game like i don't know cyberpunk 3077 in 20 years time in the future you might find that it does make a fair old difference the thing that i've just realized as i screw this into place is that actually this ssd costs more than this entire motherboard but by a fair bit it's probably what like 40 more expensive but there you go this is what your completed motherboard combo will look like and as you can see there's really not that much there at all enough mucking about though let's actually get a system built up this is the p500a from fantex but obviously this does have usbc on the front panel which you wouldn't be able to use here come on baby in you go in you go it's not a bad looking motherboard once you've got everything else in there i mean colour scheme wise it's pretty neutral but there's a little bit of accenting going on there which i really like i'm pretty uh pretty vocal these days about how all motherboards tend to look the same but at least you have a little bit of design on here let's move on to the graphics card then shall we and i haven't used this one before this is zotek's 3060 ti this looks small it is small here we go this is actually very different to the uh the 30 70 version of this card i thought it was going to be the same cooler but this is actually nice and neat look this should fit in pretty much all builds really and that should be our rig complete not looking too bad now is it and realistically what i was trying to do is almost create the rig that you might upgrade to later because yes i know it's not really realistic to have like custom cables super high in ram maybe you know like 120 pound watercolor and stuff elgato capture cards but if it can support all of these things in the future then it gives you something to upgrade to and it does i guess give you a nice path to save some money in the first instance but then obviously have something that you can be super proud of in the end game really i mean you could watercolor this if you really wanted to i've never seen a watercolor pc with a 100 pound motherboard before but there's a first time for everything future video idea here we go oh it's doing something the fans are on looking pretty swish we've got some error leds but hopefully those will disappear in just a second i need to plug the monitor in of course i do first boot unsuccessful let's try again so we've got a cpu and dram led lit at the same time so maybe it is just as simple as trying out some new ram i guess i did say i expected it to work first time but i told you the problems do exist let's try some 3200 megahertz vengeance pro i mean if this board doesn't work that would be a complete waste of time wouldn't it oh oh it's doing something there we go aha that looks better it's thinking about it maybe well the lights have gone out but it still says no signal ah hey yes yes see now that is the thing right this is the thing with ryzen honestly it is still a little bit unpredictable when it comes to the first boot so so be calm is my advice somewhat mild panic over there and let's actually have a look at the bios so you can see there you go version 1.1 on the bios ram speed is running at 2133 so a lot lower than its rated one so we have to go into the oc tweaker and actually set that to be its full speed but i want to update this bios actually for a second and we'll go update to hopefully run on version 1.7 let's hope we don't get a power cut let's actually load up this xmp profobo on this vengeance ram and see if we can get this to boot oh we've booted into we've booted into the wrong thing there that's not what i wanted to do at all the wi-fi seems to certainly work as well as we update our nvidia drivers interestingly it does seem that the wifi speed is definitely reduced compared to some of the higher end boards it is indeed i've just tested that computer on the same wi-fi and we're getting about 310 whereas on here we're getting anywhere from around about 70 to 80. you do get some software with this however so here you can see we've got performance mode standard and then power saving we've got a little bit of an oc tweaker as well so you can adjust some of the ryzen settings on the fly which is nice i wouldn't expect to be able to push this that far but it may well be worth a go system information so you can see everything that's going on but then for me it's all about this fan tastic tuning they seem to have understood my sense of humor here there is a fan test that you can just say start and then it will automatically tune everything for you which is pretty good auto apply when the program starts and then it was at this point that everything started to go a little bit wrong i mean i mean everything really my camera decided to run out of storage my other camera decided to run out of battery then my microphone also ran out of battery which is why you've got benchmark markers here today but he sounds a little bit sad i was unable to get the elgato capture card to work but i think that this isn't going to be a bandwidth limitation because i've had this problem on loads of different systems and unfortunately the way i normally get around it is to just move it to a different slot but obviously you can't do that on this board because there aren't any more in terms of things like performance though i was actually very pleasantly surprised because the cinebench score came in pretty much normal exactly what you'd expect which is fantastic and it shows that the cpu performance was performing as it should gaming performance as well you can see here there's some lovely control footage and the rtx 360 ti with this cpu is a perfect pairing like honestly the two works so well together it's not the highest end setup in the world and the cpu might hold you back in some games but for what you're probably going to be using this for honestly it's fantastic really does come highly recommended no issues here it was at this point that i decided to get an adapter out of my draw and another nvme ssd to test out pci gen 3 performance and this was pretty much flawless i mean this is a kc 2500 and we got very good read and write speeds so this was clearly working as intended but then it got even stranger when we moved over to the ssd that was actually our boot drive that samsung 980 pro because we were clearly getting pci gen 4 performance when it comes to the read speeds i mean this blew me away it was pretty much bang on the money but then the write speeds were being very consistently funny i mean way lower than they should be so this is clearly just a bug in the system somewhere but i was unable to fix it i would say that a lot of these problems are down to the motherboard i mean the wi-fi for instance is differently down to the motherboard that's that's silly it's almost not worth having and then just buying something separately but when it comes to the compatibility issues i don't know maybe time will tell that bias update certainly helps the ram but will it help the rest of the system i don't know what this motherboard is all about is to give you all of the features that you need bring the cost as far down as possible and then pretty much chuck everything else out that i don't know some people will have and others won't the main thing is that the cpu support seems to be as good as i could realistically expect in terms of performance i don't think you're going to see a huge difference between this and say like a strix board for instance it's a very good all-round motherboard then just be aware of its limitations mainly being that if you do want to go for 5000 series ryzen you are going to need to have a chip on hand to do the update yourself or find some sort of way around the problem because you know you might find that you get a motherboard and it's just not the right up-to-date bios maybe if you're watching this video in a year or so you'll be more confident in picking it up and thinking that we'll have an up-to-date bios but it is going to be a risk i'd love to hear your thoughts on this one though will we be picking up the super cheap phantom gaming or will you be looking at something else i would absolutely love to hear from you if you do want to check out current pricing you can find that with my amazon affiliate links listed down below and of course while you're down there don't forget to check out netgear's awesome nighthawk mesh with one router and two nodes included in the mk 63 pack you can get incredible wi-fi coverage even with a larger home that's up to 3250 square feet wi-fi 6 manages bandwidth more effectively across all of your devices in the home so you can fire up the tv in the living room the console for kids and then of course the pc and the gaming den all at the same time without too much strain on your network more devices online smoother streaming check out this epic step towards next-gen networking today with that link down below a massive thank you to me for actually supplying this review sample if you like the fact that i can actually spend my own money on making these videos then please smash that like button and get subscribed it makes the world of difference and it genuinely does make videos like this possible so thank you so much for watching i appreciate it i'll see in the next one you\n"