ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming WiFi Motherboard Review

How Much Does It Cost?

Do you dive into your Scrooge McDuck vault and swim around in gold coins each morning? If yes, that may be to your advantage, as you need pretty deep pockets to get the ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming WiFi Motherboard. It’s £569.99, so clearly, it’s not going to appeal to the majority of gaming PC builders’ budgets. However, as you can see in many of our benchmarks, you do not need this motherboard for gaming, as much more affordable models from ASUS and other brands get very closer for a fraction of the price.

Overview

If other motherboards get close to the performance for a fraction of the price, why on earth would you buy this motherboard? Well, FPS isn’t everything, and it’s how this motherboard can maintain the performance that really sets it apart. A much cheaper motherboard will hit the boost clocks on the fastest CPUs likely without issue while you render a short video or play a game. However, if you’re doing huge amounts of rendering, compiling, extreme gaming and pushing that CPU harder for longer, that’s where the cracks start to show. With its much expanded VRM configuration, huge heatsinks, and greatly improved power management components, all combine to maintain that high-end performance for significantly longer and with greatly improved system stability and longevity.

The big elephant in the room is still the price though, even though you’re paying for more complex and comprehensive performance technology that still only accounts for about half the price of this motherboard. Connectivity is king here, and it’s packed full of features that firstly, do not come cheap, and secondly, you likely do not need. That’s right, I’m telling you, yes you, that you probably do not want to buy this motherboard. Unless you see much need for a pair of PCIE 5.0 x16 lanes, when likely one is enough. Unless you need three USB Type-C and 12 USB-Type-A high-speed USB slots, and four M.2 slots is one thing, but do you really need three of them to be PCIe 5.0? That’s some pretty insanely high-end future proofing, that’s for sure.

Should I Buy One?

This is an exceptional motherboard, truly it’s one of the best we’ve ever tested and one of the most powerful, and most comprehensively expandable too. It’s astonishing to see it deliver both extremely fast performance and lower power usage at the same time, while still maintaining excellent VRM temperatures. If you’re just gaming, you can get close to the same performance for half the price. However, if you’re a developer or content creator that needs vast amounts of high-speed USB and storage devices, as well as a pair of flagship workstation GPUs, the connectivity on this motherboard is truly awesome, but for everyone else, it’s complete overkill.