ASUS ROG Strix B860-A Gaming Wi-Fi Review 6

ASUS ROG Strix B860-A Gaming Wi-Fi Review

Component Analysis »

Board Layout


Anything that stands out from the motherboard crowd is a good thing and the silvery white finish of the heatsinks and PCB on ASUS ROG Strix B860-A Gaming Wi-Fi looks great, if not quite as pure white as the competition, especially from Gigabyte, which also goes one step further and has white ports and slots and connectors too. The only RGB onboard here is on the I/O shroud, but you also get the usual 3-pin ARGB headers with three on the PCB in total. As many of you mentioned with our review this board's B850 sibling recently, the ROG logo on the rear is a nice touch, but it's unlikely you'll ever see it in a typical PC case. There's also no extra VRM cooling or backplate here, but since overclocking isn't possible, we can't be too critical here. We're not going to be dealing with a Core i9-14900K either.


The seven 4-pin fan headers are all rated at 12 W each and are placed reasonably well on the PCB with most located at the top or bottom for neater cable tidying. This layout is okay so long as you have enough in each location, but three up top should be enough for most situations. The header located below the I/O shroud might be useful for a third party M.2 heatsink, but rear case fan cables are nearly always best routed up over the motherboard to hide them so we'd rather have seen this up near the two EPS12V connectors. The front Type-C header offers 15 W of power and being USB 3.2 Gen 2, provides 10 Gbps speed


There seems to be a resurgence of 2-pin thermal headers with this generation of boards and not just with ASUS, but with no probe in the box it's unlikely many will take advantage of them. They are useful for tying fan speeds to specific areas of your case as well as coolant if you have a custom watercooling loop, but it's still a niche feature that only those that like to delve deep into fine-tuning their PC's cooling will use. Maybe ASUS sees this board as high-end for B860, but then it lacks power and reset buttons and LED POST code displays. You could argue those are more useful when overclocking is involved though.


There are four SATA ports in total, with the other two sat under the PCH heatsink, which is double the amount that we've seen on some low-end X870 boards, but for some reason its Intel Z890 counterpart also has four, so it seems it's mainly its AMD 800-series chipset boards that are shedding SATA ports. More points for good layout here too, with plenty of RGB and fan headers located at the edge of the PCB for easier cable tidying. The lower PCIe slot is limited to four lanes and PCIe Gen 4.


If you're not keen on the Realtek 4000-series codecs then ASUS has used the ALC1220 here under its SupremeFX branding. On the right is the 4-pin header located to the left of the M.2 port. It's not easy to access once your graphics card is installed so unless you're using a third party fan assisted M.2 heatsink, the best option to make use of it would be to route the cable out over the edge of the motherboard. We'd definitely rather this was at the top of the PCB.


ASUS has a few M.2 heatsink tool-free contraptions under its Q-Release banner, but here a large latch secures the heatsink at one end and hooks under a mount at the other. We'd maybe have liked to see a larger heatsink for dealing with sustained workloads through a PCIe Gen 5 SSD, but we can't argue with the tool free mechanism here as it's easily the best we've seen of any manufacturer.


It takes seconds to remove and install an M.2 SSD in the top slot thanks also to a tool-free SSD installation. There are also pads to support single-sided SSDs, but this is the only slot to offer double-sided cooling above and below. The second slot drops to PCIe Gen 4 and has a much thinner heatsink that is screwed into place, while the third and fourth are also PCIe Gen 4 and use a larger heatsink. There's only a small amount of lane sharing going on, with the fourth M.2 slot being disabled if the lower PCIe slot is occupied. Otherwise, all M.2 slots can be used at their rated speed concurrently. From an ease of use point of view, the top slot is by far the easiest to work with as the heatsinks below it can be fiddly to line up and screw into place.


The rear I/O panel has eight Type-A USB ports, with half of those being USB 2.0, two at USB 3.0 and two at USB 3.2 Gen 2 offering 10 Gbps, with the latter being accompanied by one of the two Type-C ports. The second Type-C is actually USB4-capable, and in turn Thunderbolt compatible too, but only offers 20 Gbps while also doubling as a DisplayPort output, complementing the HDMI and DisplayPort outputs already here. ASUS has switched to its Q-Antenna Wi-Fi connectors here that are certainly easier than dealing with the gold screw caps on antennas previously, plus there are CMOS clear and BIOS Flashback buttons here too. The audio features your now typical trio of ports - two 3.5 mmm and one optical, with owners of 5.1-channel and higher speaker systems either needing an external audio device or needing to make use of the front panel ports on your case to add channels.
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Jan 28th, 2025 08:46 EST change timezone

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