ASRock Phantom Gaming X870 Nova WiFi review - Delivering a solid core feature set

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

The flurry of 800-series refresh motherboard releases has given us some compelling sub-$300 AMD AM5 options. While there are plenty of capable B850 options, you'll need to step up to the X870 chipset for better connectivity and expansion potential. The ASRock Phantom Gaming X870 Nova WiFi is one such board, offering a plethora of features at a price that won't leave your wallet crying.

The Nova series sits at the high end of ASRock's Phantom Gaming range. It sits below the Taichi family, and above the Steel Legend and LiveMixer series. We were particularly impressed by the X870 LiveMixer, so the X870 Nova WiFi faces tough competition, not just from ASRock's competitors but also its own products.

It's off to a good start, with a very good list of headline features. You get a strong VRM and support for five M.2 SSDs, all of which feature high-quality cooling. USB4 is present as part of a strong USB complement. WiFi 7 and 5G LAN are present, giving the board good expansion and connectivity potential.

The X870 Nova supports AMD AM5 Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 series CPUs. As a gaming-themed board, it's expected to power an overclocked 9950X3D processor, a high-end graphics card, and up to 256GB of memory.

In addition to a strong feature set, the board offers good value for money. The X870 Nova is available for $269, though you'll likely find discounts during the holiday shopping season.

Further Socket AM5 Reading – Our Latest Reviews

• ASRock X870 Taichi Creator Motherboard Review - The creator's Taichi
• Sapphire Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 review - Welcome back to the motherboard market!
• MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition Review - A feature-complete flagship for the ultra enthusiast

Best Deals: ASRock Z890 Nova Motherboard

	Today	7 days ago	30 days ago
	-	-	$349.99 USD	Buy
	-	-	$606.12 CAD	Buy
	-	-	£334.14	Buy
	-	-	$349.99 USD	Buy
* Prices last scanned 2/1/2026 at 7:57 am CST - prices may be inaccurate. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. We earn affiliate commission from any Newegg or PCCG sales.

Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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Deep Purple! The X870 Nova WiFi box is otherwise unassuming, with only a select few highlights.

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The rear of the box provides a complete rundown of all the board's key features and specifications.

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X870 Nova WiFi comes with a standard set of accessories. There are a pair of WiFi antennas, two SATA cables, a thermistor cable, and a case sticker. A quick setup guide and regulatory notices join these. A 3-in-1 ARGB splitter cable will be helpful for those owning triple ARGB fan cases.

You will be prompted to download the board's drivers and utilities when you connect to the internet for the first time. Alternatively, you can visit the ASRock website to obtain the board's drivers and utilities.

Motherboard Overview

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The ASRock X870 Nova WiFi is one of the more visually striking boards available. In the current era, it's far more common to see mostly black designs. The heavy use of purple on the X870 Nova will make it harder to blend into a wide variety of build themes, but then a nice RGB build with lots of purple should look really good.

The board features a row of RGB LEDs at the bottom of the lower M.2 heatsinks. Additionally, there are three onboard ARGB headers, plus an additional 12V/3A RGB header that can supply up to 36W to RGB strips.

The X870 Nova includes a total of seven fan headers, six of which can supply up to 3A/36W. It's also nice to see power and reset buttons along with a debug LED readout. A thermistor header can be used with the bundled cable.

The USB header complement is strong, including a front 20Gbps Type-C port that supports 36W fast charging. That'll come in handy for phone charging. There are also headers supporting up to four 5Gbps ports and four USB 2.0 ports. If you were to populate all these headers and combine them with the ports on the back panel, you would have a total of 21 USB ports available.

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It's rare to see boards with backplates outside of the high-end market. Aside from adding rigidity to the board, the plate includes thermal pads that help to cool both banks of VRM MOSFETs.

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Four DIMM slots support DDR5-8400+ speeds and a maximum capacity of 256 GB. However, AMD continues to say that the sweet spot for a Ryzen 7000 or 9000 CPU is around DDR5-6000 to 6400, where the memory controller can run in a 1:1 configuration. Running faster memory can result in a latency penalty, which is generally not beneficial for gamers.

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The X870 Nova features an 18+2+1 (VCORE, SOC, MISC) phase VRM with 80A stages. It's more than enough to handle our Ryzen 9 9950X CPU.

The X870 Nova WiFi features a large heatsink assembly and benefits from the rear backplate's cooling. Our test with a 10-minute Cinebench R24 loop reached a peak VRM temperature of just 56 degrees Celsius, which is absolutely fine given that modern VRMs are usually rated for 100 degrees or more.

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The ASRock X870 LiveMixer has five PCB-mounted M.2 slots, of which two support PCIe 5.0 drives. The primary M.2 slot has its own beefy screwless heatsink. The slot immediately underneath the primary PCIe x16 slot also supports PCIe 5.0 drives. The lower three M.2 slots support PCIe 4.0 drives.

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A screw-in plate cools the row of three slots on the left side, while a single small plate cools the fifth and final drive underneath the chipset heatsink, which is separated from all of the M.2 cooling.

As we move into 2026, it's clear that SATA is falling out of favor, as the X870 Nova WiFi includes just two SATA ports. That leaves the board with support for seven storage devices. Personally, I still have several HDDs with...err...Linux ISOs, so I hope we don't lose SATA altogether for many years yet.

The board includes two PCIe slots- technically three if you include the E-Key M.2 slot for the WiFi card. The primary slot supports PCIe 5.0 x16 devices and is reinforced for heavy graphics cards. The other 16x slot supports PCIe 4.0 x4 electrically.

As the X870 Nova WiFi is an X870 model, not the dual-chipset X870E, there are some issues when the board is fully populated with M.2 drives. For example, if M.2_2 is populated, it will run at x2 speeds, along with the USB4 ports. This slot can be manually set to x4 mode, but doing so will disable the rear USB4 entirely. If the M.2_3 slot is populated, the SATA ports are disabled. Contrast that with the X870E Nova WiFi, which does not have these limitations.

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The X870 Nova WiFi's rear I/O panel is well-equipped. The USB complement begins with dual USB4 Type-C ports with graphics support. These are joined by two 10Gbps ports, three 5Gbps ports, and four USB 2.0 ports.

The yellow USB ports are what ASRock calls Lightning Gaming ports. These have their own interfaces, which aim to reduce latency and jitter. The Ultra USB Power ports draw power from the 12V PSU rail, reducing the burden on the 5V USB rail.

A Realtek RTL8126 controller controls the single 5G LAN port, while a Realtek RTL8922AE controller provides 160MHz WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports and S/PDIF. A Realtek ALC4082 codec drives these.

Finally, there's a single HDMI 2.1 port, a CMOS clear button, and a BIOS flashback button. The latter means you'll be able to install a future Zen 6 CPU without updating the BIOS with a currently available chip. The tiny cutout to the right of the button houses an LED that indicates the flash's status.

UEFI, Software and Test System

UEFI

The ASRock X870 Nova WiFI's BIOS follows the same layout and theme of recent ASRock UEFI designs. It's simple, with few graphical flourishes. However, competitors have rolled out refreshed designs, and ASRock's UEFI is looking dated.

As I've been saying for a while, the fan-tastic control page in particular needs an overhaul. It's a throwback to the 1990s.

A visit to the ASRock website will give you options to download things like the ASRock motherboard control utility and Polychrome RGB control software. The Nahimic audio software might be worth a look, too.

All the relevant drivers are available, though it's worth checking the AMD website for newer versions of the chipset and integrated graphics drivers.

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 2024 is a reliable, frequently used benchmark that measures both single and multi-threaded performance. Note that all our benchmark testing used the latest available Windows updates.

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A result of 2,314 in the nT test and 140 in the 1T test puts the ASRock at the top of the list.

Blender

High performance in 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 to record the time it takes to render the image.

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While the motherboard makes little difference in our Blender test, the 429-second result is enough to put the X870 Nova WiFi back in the lead.

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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Handbrake relies far more on the CPU and memory than the motherboard. Still, the X870 Nova performs well again.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory Latency

7Zip

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

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A result of 227.54 BIPS in this memory-sensitive benchmark puts the X870 Nova mid-pack.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

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

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The X870 Nova WiFi is toward the rear in this test, as are the other ASRock 800-series boards.

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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A score of 13,349 is mid-pack, 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.

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Numero uno for the X870 Nova WiFi!

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

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

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The X870 Nova WiFi's CPU score is nothing spectacular, but its strong graphics score gives it a better overall result.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

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

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The tested boards all deliver near-identical results in this GPU-limited game, but the X870 Nova again produces a strong graphics result, as it did in the Time Spy Extreme test.

Horizon Zero Dawn

When using the 'favor performance' preset, Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards.

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Here's another strong gaming result, even though the margins between all the boards are small.

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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The X870 Nova WiFi goes so close to making it three from three in the gaming tests. Even though the margins are again small, it's clear that the X870 Nova WiFi is a solid motherboard for gamers.

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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The X870 Nova WiFi's large VRM heatsinks keep temperatures well under control. This is particularly noteworthy for a board that's much cheaper than many in this table.

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ASRock 800 series boards all do pretty well thanks to the large surface area of their primary M.2 heatsinks.

Final Thoughts

The ASRock Phantom Gaming X870 Nova WiFi impresses with its core feature set. It offers a lot for $269. WiFi 7, USB4, PCIe 5.0 SSD, and GPU support are all present. Add to that a capable VRM and cooling, and strong SSD cooling, and you're looking at a board that doesn't lack much at this price.

The X870 Nova WiFi is a solid performer, too. Even though the motherboard makes little difference when all other components are equal, the board performed well in the graphics tests, leading in all but one, where it came in second.

The $269 X870 Nova's main problem comes from ASRock's own products. If you're on a budget, the X870 LiveMixer offers very similar features for at least $30 less. On the flipside, the X870E Nova WiFi costs about $20 more, but the extra PCIe lanes offered by the X870E chipset mean it has far fewer compromises when fully populated. It leaves the X870 Nova WiFi in a bit of a no-man's land.

We'd like four SATA ports, and a graphical overhaul of the BIOS would be welcome. Its functionality is fine, but it looks dated, particularly the fan control page, which looks poor. Even though WiFi 7 adoption is slow, some competing boards offer 320MHz WiFi 7.

Appearance-wise, the board is likely to generate some polarizing opinions. I like it quite a lot, but its predominantly purple theme might make it hard to blend into some builds. Of course, looks are in the eye of the beholder.

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At $269, the X870 Nova WiFi is a solid offering for those looking for an affordable board for use with a graphics card and an SSD or two. It'll perform well and keep your SSD cool. However, if you have several SSDs or expansion cards, there are other more appealing options, not the least of which is ASRock's own X870E Nova WiFi, which can be found for around $20 more.