ASUS announces its first TUF Gaming Mini-ITX motherboard for compact PCs

ASUS has officially announced the new TUF Gaming B850I WiFi NEO motherboard for Mini-ITX systems, and it's the first TUF Gaming board in this compact form factor. Measuring 17 by 17 centimeters, this AMD AM5 motherboard uses the more affordable B850 chipset for Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 processors.

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As it falls under the TUF Gaming banner, it sports a premium 10-layer PCB, which ASUS says is made from "server-grade" materials that extend to the reinforced PCIe slot. It also features an 8+2+1-phase VRM rated at 80A for a balanced power solution with real-time voltage control, and dual DDR5 memory slots supporting speeds of up to 9,600+ MT/s.

As a compact board, it includes only a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot for a single GPU, along with two M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSD slots underneath a heatsink. As spotted on the spec sheet, the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot runs at full speed when paired with Ryzen 9000 and 7000 CPUs, but drops to PCIe 4.0 when paired with a Ryzen 8000 Series processor.

As for the rear I/O, you've got a USB 20 Gbps Type-C port, two USB 10 Gbps Type-A ports, one USB 5 Gbps Type-A port, two USB 2.0 ports, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.1, 2.5 GbE via Realtek, Wi-Fi 6E, three audio jacks for the Realtek 7.1 Channel Audio, and BIOS FlashBack and Clear CMOS access. The motherboard also includes front-panel USB headers, ARGB headers, and fan connectors.

The new motherboard also adopts ASUS's 'Easy PC DIY' features, such as the simple-to-attach Q-Antenna for Wi-Fi, on-board troubleshooting via the Q-LED system, and a dedicated Clear CMOS button to reset BIOS settings.