ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi Motherboard Review - A board with lots of expansion potential

TweakTown Rating: 92%

Our Verdict

This high performing TUF B850 from ASUS offers good value and a mature BIOS. Thanks to an impressive four PCIe slots, you can keep your expansion cards, too.

Pros

• Four PCIe expansion slots
• Brushed metal heatsink design
• USB 20Gbps support
• Solid performer

Cons

• Tough competition at this price
• Average networking
• Small primary M.2 heatsink

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

ASUS TUF motherboards are renowned for offering a good balance of affordability, simplified designs, and comprehensive feature sets. They're particularly appealing to those who are put off by the high pricing of Strix and ROG boards. The B850 version we have here today for our review is naturally going to sell for a lower price than its X870 counterparts.

Like all B850 motherboards, the TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi offers numerous ease-of-use improvements, as well as support for AMD Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 series CPUs, and PCIe Gen 5 devices. It will happily sit at the heart of a top-spec system, with loads of memory, and the most demanding CPUs and GPUs money can buy.

The ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi features a somewhat simple and understated look. It's the kind of board that will easily blend into a wide variety of builds.

The B850-Plus WiFi has a solid feature set, though many of its features are common to boards in this price range. You get 2.5G LAN, 160MHz WiFi 7, three M.2 slots, and a 20Gbps USB port.

However, there is something that distinguishes it from many of its B850 competitors: it has four PCIe slots, making it a solid option for those with expansion cards. For some users, that alone may be a strong enough reason to choose this ASUS.

At the time of writing, the ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi is available for $227. That puts it around the price of the GIGABYTE B850 AORUS Elite, and a little higher than the MSI B850 Tomahawk Max.

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Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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In contrast to some of the simpler boxes we've seen recently, the TUF B850-Plus WiFi features additional logos on the front.

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The rear of the box provides a complete list of all the key features and specifications.

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TUF B850 WiFi comes with a relatively basic set of accessories. The WiFi antenna is a highlight. It's adjustable and well-built. You also have two SATA cables, some M.2 spacers, a quick setup guide, an ASUS Webstorage cloud service flyer, and some attractive silver TUF stickers.

Gone are the days of CD or DVD driver discs; only high-end boards come with bundled flash drives. Therefore, you'll need to visit the ASUS website to obtain the board's drivers and utilities. You can rely on the built-in DriverHub app, but consider exploring the optional modules to avoid installing unnecessary apps you may not use. The TurboV Core system control app and Aura Sync ARGB control software are two apps you should strongly consider downloading.

Motherboard Overview

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The ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi features an understated design. The brushed metal heatsinks give it an industrial look, and the fonts used give it a simple appearance that should blend in well with a wide variety of build themes.

There's just one ARGB area located at the lower right of the board, next to the chipset heatsink. If you wish to build a system with ARGB, you have three onboard headers available.

The B850-Plus WiFi is well-equipped to handle many fans and cooling. It has seven 4-pin fan headers and additional headers, including COM and USB 4 headers. However, the board is otherwise unremarkable in terms of internal I/O. For example, it lacks power, reset buttons, and a debug readout.

The USB header complement comprises a single Type-C 10Gbps port, two 5Gbps ports, and four USB 2.0 ports.

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Four DIMM slots support speeds of DDR5-8000+ with a maximum capacity of up to 256 GB. As has been the case since AMD introduced the AM5 platform, it is still recommended to run memory in the DDR5-6000 to 6400 range. Running faster memory means dropping the memory controller speed, which adds latency. Some apps respond to raw bandwidth over latency, but for gamers, the sweet spot is around that DDR5-6000-ish mark.

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The B850-Plus WiFi features a capable 14+2+1 (VCCCore, VCCGT, VCCSA) phase VRM with 80A stages. It's more than enough to handle a Ryzen 9 9950X with PBO enabled, but it's probably not a board you'd choose for very heavy overclocking. That's more of a feature native to ROG Crosshair boards.

AMD Ryzen processors are not particularly demanding on the VRM system, at least compared to what we got used to with Intel 13th and 14th Gen systems. The brushed metal heatsinks of the TUF B850-Plus WiFi appear capable, and they perform well, too. A test with a 10-minute loop of Cinebench R24 resulted in a peak VRM temperature of 57 degrees Celsius, which falls in the middle of the ten or so 800-series boards we've tested to date.

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The B850-Plus WiFi has three PCB-mounted M.2 slots. The primary M.2 slot supports PCIe 5.0 drives, while the other two support PCIe 4.0. As expected, the primary slot has a dedicated cooling block attached with screws. A single long metal plate cools the bottom pair of slots.

It's becoming increasingly common for manufacturers to integrate some kind of screwless retention mechanism, so it's somewhat unusual to see screws used for both heatsinks. That's a bit of a nitpick, but it's also fair to say the primary heatsink doesn't have a large surface area, and our testing results showed temperatures to be a few degrees higher than we'd like.

Four SATA ports join the three M.2 slots. Just seven storage ports may be limiting for some, but there is a reason for this, and it's a deliberate decision by ASUS. This choice brings us to one of the strengths of the board.

The B850-Plus WiFi features an impressive four PCIe slots. The primary slot supports PCIe 5.0 x16 devices and is reinforced for heavy graphics cards. The others support PCIe 4.0 and are all connected to the chipset. They consist of an x16 slot (x4 electrically) and two x1 slots.

Even with a triple-slot graphics card, you'll still have access to the x16 slot and an x1 slot. This makes the B850-Plus WiFi a particularly appealing option for users with expansion cards. Such a configuration is rare on B-series boards due to chipset lane limitations or a desire to maximise the number of available M.2 slots.

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The rear I/O of the board is reasonable but falls behind that of some of its competitors.

The highlight is the USB complement, consisting of a Type-C 20Gbps port, along with three 10Gbps, four 5Gbps, and two USB 2.0 ports. Ten ports should be enough for most users.

It's good to see both DP 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 ports, meaning the board is a good choice for those looking to use a CPU's integrated graphics or gain multi-monitor support without a discrete GPU.

A BIOS flashback button is a near-essential feature for AM5 boards, especially given that B850 boards are sure to support another generation of CPUs, and likely one more beyond that.

The networking options are where the B850-Plus WiFi lags a little. It includes a Realtek 2.5G controller and a MediaTek MT7925 WiFi 7 controller, which supports 160MHz connections only. Compared to just a couple of years ago, that would have been an excellent pair of networking options, but competitors are stepping up, and 5G LAN and 320MHz WiFi support are no longer uncommon in the TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi's price range.

Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports, as well as S/PDIF. A Realtek ALC1220P codec drives these.

UEFI and Test System

UEFI

Although the B850-Plus WiFi isn't specifically designed for overclocking, it still offers a range of BIOS OC functionality. Whether it's just a set-and-forget PBO setting or some serious memory tweaking, it's a capable board.

I've always found ASUS BIOS to have a little steeper learning curve compared to some manufacturers, but a general set-and-forget user will find most of what they need on the EZ-Mode page without even having to navigate to the advanced section.

Like most ASUS boards, the fan control page is top-notch, while the Q-Dashboard page is helpful for troubleshooting. This page lists nearly all the boards' headers, slots, and ports, showing a green light if they're populated. It's an easy way to troubleshoot a problematic component or peripheral.

Test System

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X - Buy from Amazon
• GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: G.Skill Trident Z Neo RGB 2x16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux - Buy from Amazon
• OS Storage: Teamgroup T-Force Z540 2TB - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: Super Flower Leadex Titanium 850W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro - Buy from Amazon

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that Intel and AMD have relied on to showcase their newest platforms during unveilings. The benchmark consists of two tests: a single-core workload that utilizes one thread, or 1T, and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads, or nT, of the tested CPU.

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A result of 2,266 in the nT test and 138 in the 1T test puts the ASUS right where we'd expect it to be when used with a Ryzen 9 9950X.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is one of many reasons a user will consider a high-core-count CPU. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

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The motherboard makes little difference in our Blender test; the result of 432 seconds is just a single second behind the fastest pair, which is nothing in percentage terms.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher value indicates that the task will take less time to complete.

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It's top of the pops for The TUF Gaming B950-Plus WiFi here.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's influenced by memory speed and latency changes and scales with the number of CPU threads.

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A result of 228.31 BIPS in this memory-sensitive benchmark is a strong result for the B850-Plus WiFi. ASUS 800-series boards have been consistently performing well in this test.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency has traditionally favored Intel and its monolithic designs.. A nanosecond or two here or there is not noticeable, but more significant margins, mainly when the memory is frequently accessed, will result in more undesirable and cumulative idle cycles.

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The margins here are not large, but again, the B850-Plus WiFi performs well and leads the charts again. Solid!

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

We'd love to use our PCs solely for leisure, but some of us have to work as well! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.

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The TUF board is mid-pack here, though the differences between the boards are not significant. This test can also vary if run several times.

3DMark Storage

UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. It is superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs of the actual game. This test is the same as running the actual game without the inconsistencies inherent in application testing.

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It's another strong result for the ASUS B850-Plus.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme is losing favor as a graphics benchmark in favor of Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

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It's becoming clear that the ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus is a strong performer, even if the margins between boards are not large, as is expected.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when features like ray tracing are disabled, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences.

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The tested boards all deliver essentially identical results in this GPU-limited game.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards when using the'Favor Performance' preset.

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Here's another gaming result that shows the motherboards are all within a small percentage of one another, at least in terms of average FPS.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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Metro Exodus, along with the other gaming results, shows that the motherboard usually makes little difference in gaming performance when all other components and settings are equal.

VRM and SSD Temperatures

These tests are performed to show off the differences between each motherboard's cooling assemblies. In the case of VRM testing, each board is subjected to a 20-minute Cinebench loop, while the SSD test records the peak temperature recorded during the lengthy 3DMark Storage test.

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As long as you have some airflow around the CPU socket, a fully loaded Ryzen 9 9950X is not a challenge for the B850-Plus WiFi.

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This is an area in which the TUF Gaming B850-Plus fell behind, and it's mostly due to the limited surface area of its primary M.2 heatsink. Still, it's not alarmingly bad. Good case airflow can make all the difference.

Final Thoughts

The ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi is a solid option in its price range, especially if you can utilize its primary strength: the number of expansion slots it offers. Not many boards have that many these days, and even fewer with lane-limited chipsets like B850 or B860. So, if you have several expansion cards, there may well be enough of a reason to choose the B850-Plus over a competing board on that alone.

Expansion slots aside, the board comes with a solid, if regulation, set of features. Three M.2 slots, 2.5G LAN, and 160MHz WiFi 7 are the minimum you'd expect in this price range. The rear USB complement is decent, and dual graphics outputs are welcome.

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The board has a lovely, subtle aesthetic, too. Some might even say it's a little plain-looking, but that suits me just fine. Once you add a heatsink and a GPU, the board gets hidden anyway. I'd rather a motherboard blend into a wider theme, and not try to dominate a build with over-the-top RGB branding.

It's a solid performer, too. Although the motherboard makes little difference when all other components are equal, the ASUS performed well, and its BIOS is a mature offering with plenty of options to tweak for advanced users.

At under $230, the B850-Plus WiFi offers reasonable value, but there's a lot of strong competition around this price point, all of which offer similar, if not superior, feature sets. There are alternative options if you prefer 5G LAN, additional M.2 slots or SATA ports, or 320MHz WiFi 7. But, if you've got that cherished sound card, streaming card, or something that you simply don't want to jettison, the TUF Gaming B850-Plus may be one to consider. If not, it is the only one to consider in this price range.

ASUS's TUF brand has earned its reputation for value for money and decent feature sets. The TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi will appeal to many buyers on the strength of the ASUS brand name alone. If it were just a tenner or two cheaper, it would really stand out. Still, it's a small premium many will be happy to pay. Its expansion potential and well-rounded feature set, combined with a mature BIOS and solid performance, make the ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi a reliable mid-range option for your Ryzen build.