ASUS TUF Gaming B650M-Plus Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

If you’ve any of the other TUF motherboards in recent years, then this new one will likely look familiar. It is pretty unique in terms of hardware configuration, but overall, it uses the same dark black, dark grey, light grey, and yellow highlights we see throughout the TUF product range. It’s not going to be to everyone’s taste, but frankly, what is!? However, I think it looks great, not too gamer, not too over the top, and certainly not boring to look at either.

It comes with some pretty chunky fins on the VRM, which have wide and separated fins that look blocky but still have a lot of material and surface area, so they should provide ample cooling to the power delivery hardware. Surrounding the CPU socket, and actually, everywhere else on this motherboard, there are good quality TUF 5K Black Metallic Capacitors, which feature 52% wider temperature tolerance and a 2.5x longer lifespan than standard motherboard capacitors.

The CPU gets power from a single 8-pin EPC connector, but there’s an additional 4-pin to provide more power stability for high-end processors.

On the lower half of the board, you’ll find three heatsinks, one on the top M.2, a smaller one on the bottom M.2, and a heatsink on the chipset to the right. The top M.2 offers support for PCIe 5.0 and the lower is PCIe 4.0.

There are four DIMM slots, with support for DDR5 6400+ OC memory.

The rear I/O is pretty well equipped too, offering up a 2.5 GbE LAN port, but no on-board WiFi, so that’s something to keep in mind if you want to go wireless. However, there’s USB 3.2 Gen2, as well as the inclusion of USB Type-C with Thunderbolt 4 and USB4 compatibility.

Stripping the heatsinks away you can see there’s a nice power configuration here, with a potent 12+2 Power Stage 60A design, Digi+ VRM, and “certified military-grade TUF chokes” that help this board live up to the quality expectations of the TUF series of motherboard.

On the lower half of the board, you can see that there are two PCIe 4.0 x16 slots, with armour on the top one to support modern bulky graphics cards better, and there’s an additional 1x slot tucked in between them too.

The VRM heatsinks are constructed in two parts, with thick layers of good quality thermal material ensuring they can evenly cool the phases of the motherboard.