ASUS ROG Strix B360 F Gaming and H370 Pro TUF Review
ROG Strix B360-F
The Strix box will be familiar to anyone who has taken some time to keep an eye on product releases. In keeping with the more affordable nature of the B360-F there are more technology logos than you see on more premium models, largely because the B360-F is more likely to find its way onto bricks and mortar store shelves.
The B360-F might be the lower of the two chipsets we have on test today but that doesn’t mean that ASUS have scrimped on the heatsink capacity. After all, the Strix can support the i7-8700K (which we’re using today) so it’s important to have some beefy cooling to keep the VRM temperatures low. The PCB is certainly attention grabbing. Whether you consider that to be a positive or not is a matter for some conjecture, but at least it’s in keeping with the gamer ethos.
If, like us, you’re more used to looking at higher end models the lower half of the Strix does betray it’s more middle-of-the-road position in the ASUS ROG range. Whilst the top might fool anyone into thinking you had a Z370, the bottom half does give the game away. That isn’t to say that you’re lacking for features though. Most people run one GPU rather than two or more, so a couple of PCI Express 3.0 slots are more than enough. Equally there is still enough room for an M.2 to keep your OS running sweetly, and the SupremeFX audio is still on a separate shielded portion of the PCB.
We’re sure that we’ve never seen singleton SATA ports before in the horizontal format. It’s perfect if you fancy creating a cable rainbow. We definitely prefer this layout to having some vertical ones strewn wherever they can find a space, as regular readers will know.
The only thing we find curious about the artwork – if we take the brashness as a given – is that it asks us to “join the Republic of Gamers”. Having purchased it to see this, haven’t we already done so?
Around the rear we find perhaps the biggest giveaway of the price of the B360-F. Everything you would hope to find is here, just perhaps in fewer numbers than you might hope, particularly if you have a lot of peripherals.
