ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 Riptide Wi-Fi Review – Amazing Price/Performance

Introduction

AMD offers some compelling reasons to upgrade your PC right now, if you’re thinking about a Ryzen 7 9800X3D or Ryzen 9 9950X3D, and you’re coming from a platform that doesn’t support Socket AM5 CPUs, then you have quite a few motherboard options. Thankfully, while launch prices wouldn’t see much change from $300 even for the cheapest models, the introduction of lower end chipsets has finally seen that situation change and the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 Riptide Wi-Fi we’re looking at here doesn’t cost much more than $200.

Of course, a lot depends on what’s been cut to get there, but with 800-series chipsets offering a bunch of premium options, if you’re just looking for the basics and enough to run a single M.2 SSD, graphics card and a few peripherals, then it doesn’t make much sense opting for an X-series chipset unless you’re totally sold on a specific model’s aesthetics or features. AMD’s B850 chipset often makes much more sense with a more balanced feature sets as well as the option to ditch certain premium features where necessary.

Here, ASRock cuts USB4 support, which is of limited use for most PC enthusiasts right now, but this means it can afford to stick to a baseline where it doesn’t have to skimp on audio, SATA ports, PCIe Gen 5 support or VRM and M.2 cooling, while still offering a Socket AM5 motherboard for just over $200. There are older chipsets to consider too, with B650 options still available, but stock is dwindling and very often you’re simply giving up even more features just to lower the price slightly. Let’s see if ASRock has struck a decent balance.

Specifications