ASUS ROG Strix B650E-F Gaming WiFi Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

ASUS has a strong record for making great-looking motherboards, and I’ve always been a fan of their STRIIX designs, as they’re always geared up to excite the gaming market, especially with their STRIX designs which have large heatsinks and funky graphics printed all over them.

The VRM heatsinks are nice and large, and so they should be on a STRIX board, which has a powerful VRM configuration, so it should be able to push some decent CPU performance from the flagship Ryzen 700 series CPUs.

The CPU is fed from an 8-pin EPS connector, but there’s an optional 4-pin to add more power and improve overall voltage stability for more powerful processors.

There are four DIMM slots, which come with some reinforcement in the middle and on the ends to ensure the slots don’t bend or flex.

The lower half of the board features four separate heatsinks, with a thicker one on the primary M.2 slot, two longer ones on the lower M.2 slots, and a larger one for the chipset, so all your hardware should run at its best.

The top PCIe slot is fully armoured too, so it should have no problems dealing with the bulky weight of modern graphics cards.

Stripping away the armour, it’s easy to see there’s a robust-looking VRM configuration here, with premium quality black capacitors surrounding the CPU, but also everywhere else on the board, as this is a premium quality motherboard overall.

The CPU uses a 12+2 VRM configuration with 80A power stages, which may not be as crazy as what we see on the flagship boards, but it’s certainly more than anyone needs and should be more than enough to push the top-end Ryzen 7000 series CPU boost clocks to their max