ASUS ROG Strix X370i Gaming Review

Conclusion

This is going to be pretty simple.

Lots of high end motherboards come with oodles of cables and accessories that remain, largely, in the box, in the cupboard. Equally it’s lovely to have the capability to run three or more graphics cards in a multi-GPU setup, just as it is great to be able to RAID M.2 drives, but let’s be honest here for 90% of people those slots do nothing than make you feel good about the futureproofing you’ve invested in for some theoretical future purchase you’re not going to make.

So why not dispense with the concept of buying a seriously pricey flagship motherboard that has loads of slots that will never be filled, admit you just want the best possible overclock and enough performance to run the one GPU you own, and save yourself a few quid?

The ASUS X370-i Strix Gaming is perfect for that. Sure it’s compact, but it’s an ITX motherboard so what else did you expect? That compact nature means that there might be some fewer high end hardware slots than you would get from something like the Crosshair VI Extreme. But that’s the only negative really. For nearly all of us this has the perfect amount of slots to take the type of build than most of us run. Don’t for a moment think that you’re getting any less performance though. This might be an ITX motherboard but ASUS have absolutely knocked it out of the park when it comes to overclocking capabilities and consistent performance.

A big part of the relentlessness of the performance we saw in our testing today is thanks to the outstanding VRM cooling which lets even the overclocked Ryzen 7 1800X work at its fullest capacity no matter how difficult the benchmark was. You’ll rarely ask more of a system than our 4K Blender test and yet the Strix passed with flying colours.

If you’re not a size queen then this is all the motherboard you could ever require. M.2 support, PCI Express 3.0, USB 3.1, plenty of headers, AURA Sync lighting support and some mental performance. You owe it to yourself to dispense with your prejudice and check out the ASUS ROG Strix X370-i. You’ll be picking your jaw up from the floor.

  

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