ASUS TUF Gaming X670E-Plus WiFi Preview
Up Close
Although we said on the previous page that this is the black version of the Prime, or that the white version of this, there are nonetheless some subtle changes between the two that might be enough to sway you if you aren’t committed to a certain colour scheme.
Certainly the £300 price tag makes you expect to find very little in the way of accessories, and with just some M.2 screws, SATA cables and the ASUS WiFi antenna, you don’t get much more than the necessities. If you feel that you’re being short changed just go and find your current motherboard box and see what’s still in it, unused. Exactly. We’d rather save a few spondulicks instead of having cables we’ll never need.
Often the TUF has been a motherboard which looks cheap. You get a feel for these things over time, and when you’re missing slot armour, or only have vertical SATA ports, or the VRM heatsinks are just a block of metal, it’s a bit of a giveaway. However, the X670E is anything but. Okay there isn’t a fancy RGB logo, or a full cover, or some of the elements you find on the ROG models, but neither does it look like the choice of those with a limited budget.
The co-ordinates take you to ASUS headquarters, if you were curious. Whereas the Prime had just two slashes through its VRM heatsinks, the TUF has all of them separated so that each ‘tab’ handles two elements. Naturally it’s all tied together underneath, but that extra surface area might count when the going gets tough.
Down the bottom we have plenty of heat spreaders for the M.2 slots, as well as an uncovered one should you have a heatsink equipped drive. The concession to RGB is in the form of the heavily stylised TUF logo on the right hand edge. So overly designed that if you didn’t know it was meant to say TUF you might not see it.
As we begin our trip around the board we start off with the 8+8 12V CPU headers. The exact type of thing that on earlier TUFs might have just been 8+4 or even a single 8. You’ve come a long way, baby.
CPU cooling is handled by the usual Pump + 2 fan headers that have rapidly become the norm. Even if you run a 120mm radiator then it’s nice to have an extra header, and if you run a 240 or bigger it’s nice not to have to daisy chain all your fans. We’re big fans of flexibility. The first place the TUF differentiates itself from the Prime is the ARGB and RGB AURA headers up here, where the Prime just had an ARGB.
