Review: ASUS TUF X470 Plus-Gaming

As HH touched on this board really is poorly equipped with what is actually the same 4+2 phase supply used on the earlier 350 boards. Those board's VRMs could overheat significantly on a 1700 overclocked running a heavy workload. buildzoid registered temps of 127c in such situations. Combine that with the 2700x being capable of pulling significantly more power in standard configs to the older gen chips and this really does not equate to a power supply setup for a X470 branded board, especially one holding the TUF branding. A very poor move by Asus.

I liked his conclusion - Avoid like the plague...

Obviously if you want to run a lower end Ryzen+ CPU with lower power consumption requirements then this board should be adequate, but you are still paying (lowish) x470 prices for what is Really a 450 board.

(edited for a typo)

 

Nice review @Hilbert Hagedoorn and spot-on recommendations.

 

That's a fair conclusion. I thought the back panel was a bit bare, personally, like to see more USB than that.

 

I had the Z370 version of this board. ASUS makes a great BIOS for overclocking, but they just cut back wayyy too much on the VRMs. At stock clocks with high load-line calibration, I was already seeing the CPU throttle because of VRM temperatures. That simply shouldn't be happening that easily. My 8700K would see ~130W in Prime, but would just keep climbing to over 200W.

I ended up returning it and getting an ASRock Extreme 4 which certainly has a more difficult overclocking interface, but the VRM setup is far more robust. I have a probe between the heatsink and the thermal pad on my VRMs and rarely see it hit 55C. At a 5.2GHz overclock at 1.4v no less. My power usage hangs out at about 170W and doesn't climb.

So the TUF series isn't exactly "TUF". It's a great board for running things stock, or perhaps overclocking 6-core i5s or 4-core i7s. But it feels like they were hoping people wouldn't notice where they cut corners.

Aesthetically, I actually really liked it. Sort of a classic "factory" look that some might find cheesy, but I thought looked pretty good alongside the cleaner look of modern pc components.

 

You get six power phases, -- no way ! looks like a stock 4+2

 

excellent review as always HH.
you're quite right in (almost) saying this is a B450 board in disguise.
at this price point Asus should ditch the "Tuf" branding, as there are no heatsinks for the M.2, no "thermal armor", and worst of all, no wifi.
the simple fact is you can add wifi at any price point as it is always worth the additional cost.
an extra pcie slot x4 (2.0) isn't worth the money it took to place it on the board.
i have a sinking feeling it's there only because in the ATX format, it would look weird not to have at least 2 (if not 3) pcie slots.
Asus, you can do way better. this same board in ITX would sell like hotcakes. especially as they've (to my knowledge) never released a "tuf" ITX. Not everyone would be willing to pay $200+ for a R.O.G. ITX. a "tuf" ITX with wifi would sell really well (imo) at $150-170.

 

it would be nice to see a benchmark of this cpu on a b350 mobo just to see if its worth upgrading to a 4xx mobo if you upgrade from ryzen to zen +

 

I really wish I'd gone with the Prime x470 mobo now after having the TUF for a couple of weeks it's a piece of crap
things that are wrong with it
1: No control of aRGB on the Wraith Spire (despite being plugged into the mobo's ARGB port)
2: PCIe x16 is only that speed if you don't have anything plugged into the second X4(X16) slot even if it not another GPU otherwise all you get is PCIe X8 on the primary slot
3: Not enough USB ports on the IO panel
4: No Optical out (couldn't give a toss about SPDIF in)
5: Crap position of SATA 1/2 and 3/4 there was room enough to have them all in the one spot along the bottom edge with ports 5/6 this leads to poor cable position
6: No FSB control in any of the BIOS screens and can't even stick to the 100MHz it's supposed to be, leading to some wonky readings for CPU/RAM speeds
7: quite a low end VRM for something that's named TUF they should change the brand name to CR@P if this is the way they're going to go
8: The Aura ARGB software is garbage and clunky the Wraith Spire ARGB doesn't show up in it so no control other than on/off Via BIOS
9: My GSkil TridentZ RGB don't turn off their LED's when system is put into sleep mode

I could probably go with a few more but those are the main BAD points of this Mobo

Seriously wish I'd gone with the Prime X470 MOBO

 

Not saying that the board is good/worth the money, but #2 is irrelevant (16x vs 8x)
So far almost all tests i have seen from sites like guru3d and others, what all my gaming friends/teammates have observed, and what tests i've done myself (running gtx960 up till 1080ti), 8x (3.0) will actually be faster than using 16x, as you have less overhead etc.

Not even talking about that the cards that CAN actually saturate a pcix,
(so that you would need 16x), aren't usually used on mid/lower end boards.
And the ones that do run a 2080/ti on something like this, dont deserve better