Introduction

With cheaper motherboards for both AMD Socket AM5 and Intel LGA1851 on the horizon and with 600-series chipset boards still easy to find, it’s a wonder that X870 motherboards are racking up encouraging numbers of reviews on various retailer websites. Especially since AMD’s disappointing launch of the first wave of Zen 5 CPUs a few months ago. Still, the new attractive designs, cutting edge features, lack of competition from the blue team and the launch of the excellent Ryzen 7 9800X3D has helped and if you’re in the market for something a little cheaper than the boards we’ve looked at so far, then this review of the ASUS ROG Strix X870-A Gaming Wi-Fi stands out as the first sub $400 X870 board we’ve examined.

Readily available for under $350, there will undoubtedly be cutbacks in order to include the premium X870 chipset, but at first glance the ROG Strix X870-A Gaming Wi-Fi looks the part and doesn’t seem to visibly cut any corners with massive VRM and M.2 heatsinks, snazzy RGB lighting on the I/O shroud and even a white color scheme including the PCB. There are some darker details on the board so it’s maybe not the perfect option we’ve seen for a pure white build, but it certainly stands out from the crowd.

As usual there’s a strong emphasis on tool-free features, cooling and of course ASUS has a significantly-tweaked their EFI too with some great features that we’ll be looking at later. The competition is pretty fierce below $400 with plenty of good options, including a variety of white motherboards including some impressive ones from Gigabyte that we’ll be looking at soon.

A glance at its features clearly point at the ROG Strix X870-A Gaming Wi-Fi being aimed at high-end systems, so if the likes of the formidable ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero are way outside your budget, this is likely where you’ll look next. The question is whether there’s enough here to justify spending more compared to established B650 and X670 boards or waiting for B850 to arrive.

Specifications

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