Introduction
If recent sales figures are anything to go by, quite a few of you out there have shiny new Ryzen 7 9800X3D’s, and perhaps you’re currently looking for an equally shiny new home for them. If that’s you, then today is a good day because AMD and its motherboard partners are announcing their new Socket AM5 motherboards using cheaper B850 and B840 chipsets. In short, if you want cutting edge features and a board to see you through to the end of Socket AM5, but don’t want to take out a bank loan for an X870 model, then the B-series chipset boards should save you some cash and first out the door is the ASUS ROG Strix B850-F Gaming Wi-Fi.
B850 is where M.2 PCIe Gen 5 and USB4 become optional, there are fewer PCIe lanes and with B840 it loses some of those features entirely. However, B850 has one big advantage over its embattled adversary in that Intel’s B-series chipsets do not support overclocking. B850 does so in addition to the usual PBO/Curve Optimizer/Shaper tweaks you can even dial things up a notch with a manual overclock.
For this reason, VRMs and cooling are still pretty important and these areas are where B-series boards have become bestsellers or fallen into review oblivion in the past. We’re not given anything an easy pass here, though, as we’re still pitching the ASUS ROG Strix B850-F Gaming Wi-Fi and any other B-series board for that matter, against our Ryzen 9 9950X to make sure it can cope with practically anything.
Specifications
| Specifications | |
|---|---|
| CPU Support: | AMD Socket AM5 Ryzen 7000, 9000 |
| Power Design: | CPU Power: 16-phase SOC Power: 2-phase MISC Power: 2-phase |
| Chipset: | AMD X870E |
| Integrated Graphics: | Supported 1x HDMI 1x DisplayPort |
| Memory: | 4x DIMM, Support up to 256 GB 2x Single Rank DDR5-8000 (OC) |
| BIOS: | 256 Mbit AMI UEFI |
| Expansion Slots: | 1x PCIe Gen 5 x16 slot (x16/x0) or (x8/x4) 1x PCIe Gen 4 x16 slot (x8/x4) |
| Storage: | 2x SATA 6 Gb/s 2x M.2 (PCIe Gen 5 x4) 2x M.2 (PCIe Gen 4 x4) |
| Networking: | 1x Intel 2.5 Gbps Ethernet 1x Wi-Fi 7 |
| Rear Ports: | BIOS Flashback button Clear CMOS button 1x 2.5 Gbps Ethernet 1x HDMI port 1x DisplayPort 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 20 Gbps (Type-C) 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps (Type-C) 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps (Type-A) 4x USB 3.0 (Type-A) 4x USB 2.0 (Type-A) 2x Wi-Fi antenna connectors 2x Audio jacks 1x Optical S/PDIF Out port |
| Audio: | 1x Realtek ALC4080 Codec |
| Fan / Thermistor headers: | 7x 4-pin / 1x 2-pin |
| Form Factor: | ATX Form Factor 12.0 x 9.6 in. / 30.5 x 24.3 cm |
| Exclusive Features: |
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