ASUS TUF Gaming X870-Pro W NEO Review
Conclusion
Conclusion
Often we end up discussing performance when it comes to hardware. After all, to a greater or lesser degree that’s what we all care about. Even those who might have aesthetics and price first and second, still have performance on the list.
One of the coolest things about recent chipsets is their relative uniformity. There are obviously high end options that deliver more overclocking prowess, or a bigger feature set. For the majority of us, the build and go types, performance is fairly consistent across the board. Our time with the TUF Gaming Pro NEO only reinforced this. No matter what we threw at it, it handled them all with aplomb. The big stacks of VRM heatsinks also did really well at keeping everything cool. There have been more complicated designs, but sometimes a big hunt of metal is enough.
What we really come away impressed by is the aesthetics. There are plenty of white choices on the market now. A lot of them lean somewhat towards using silver wherever possible, so you’ve got light colouring without necessarily being white. Similarly we’ve seen a lot that have white plastics on a black PCB. Or vice versa. Every time we looked at the TUF NEO we saw another way in which attention to detail had been the watchword. White plastics everywhere. When an alternate colour was needed, light grey was used. And when metal was needed, it was as light silver as possible. Really impressive.
In fact the only couple of things we found odd were; 1) the cut out in the IO shield we spoke of before. If your room is anything like our office there will be a dead spider in there within a year. And secondly the placement of the LAN port. It might only be a few inches but given how inflexible LAN cables are, having it at the top just makes plugging USB cables in more of a fight than we like. But that depends on how often you change your peripherals.
The ASUS TUF Gaming X870-Pro W NEO has plenty of power for even the flagship Ryzen processors, enough connectivity for the majority of users and a white aesthetic that is perfect if you prefer lighter systems, and wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.
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