ASUS ROG STRIX X470-F Gaming Motherboard Review
Peter Donnell / 6 years ago
A Closer Look
ASUS is well known for creating gorgeous looking motherboards, and the X470-F certainly doesn’t disappoint in this regard. A black PCB with all black hardware really gives it a menacing presence. Of course, a few touches of silver and grey on the heatsinks and shrouds break up the design a little. There’s some RGB lighting built-in to the shrouds, and some lovely gaming focused graphics on the chipset cover too.
The VRM heatsinks look pretty competent and have a good surface area over the power delivery hardware. The Rear I/O guard extends over to keep things looking neat and tidy but isn’t so big that it compromises the CPU cooler clearance.
AM4
The AM4 socket is the same one we already know and love. It’ll support first gen Ryzen, the new second generation, and no doubt a few more generations of processors to come.
There are four DIMM slots on the motherboard, they’re not armored though, which is becoming more commonplace. There’s a few fan headers here, as well as a Type-C front panel header.
Storage
Storage is handled by a bank of six SATA ports on the left side of the motherboard. Of course, there’s also more fan headers here, RGBW headers, and USB 3.0.
For those who want even faster storage, you’ll find a single M.2 heatsink above the PCIe slots, and the second one without a heatsink towards the bottom.
SupremeFX
With SupremeFX audio processing and dedicated capacitors for the built-in AMP/DAC, you can expect great audio performance. Of course, it’s all mounted on the other side of a trace, ensuring its isolated from the rest of the PCB.
There are two full-size slots with armor on the motherboard, so supporting multiple heavy-duty gaming GPUs shouldn’t be an issue. There’s a third one at the bottom without armor, as well as a few 1x slots too, which are great for additional PCIe devices.
Integrated I/O Shield
Finally, my favorite part of the motherboard is the rear I/O. It’s pre-installed so you can’t forget to install it when you build your rig. Of course, it’s also pretty well equipped with USB ports, audio connectivity, and display outputs.
