ASUS ROG Strix X670E-F Gaming WIFI (AMD AM5)

As you can see from our testing there is, as is becoming the norm, very little to choose between any of the available AM5 options. Which one you choose will largely depend upon your budget - there is a £300 gap between the ASUS Prime and the ASUS Crosshair Hero for example - and the feature set you wish to own. The ASUS ROG Strix X670E-F Gaming WiFi sits somewhere in the middle ground of the price bracket, but that doesn't mean that you're giving up too much if you choose the model that is almost guaranteed to be the biggest seller in the ASUS range. If we had to try and describe it in a pithy manner we might suggest it's the motherboard for those of you who want features that you can use today, rather than paying extra for elements which might not be used for a generation. For example, the Strix F doesn't have any USB 4.0 ports on the backplate, with a single Thunderbolt internal header for such ventures. Additionally the LAN is 2.5G, an amount of bandwidth that all but the most hardcore networkers will find to be sufficient. However, there are nods to the current leading-edge technologies. The Strix X670E-F has four M.2 slots and two of those are dedicated PCI Express 5.0 ones, so if you happen to be super flush with cash and unable to have your storage solution be quick enough to sate your needs then you have not one but two places to install those ultra-fast drives. Naturally you might give up a few PCI Express lanes for your graphics card, but even the very latest GPUs struggle to saturate PCIe 4.0, so it's a good trade-off. Whilst our tests show that anything you choose should run at a similar speed, the Strix F employs ASUS own take on the Precision Boost Overdrive feature that AMD utilise, which can take your CPU to new heights in very intensive scenarios. We capped the thermals at 80°C and the motherboard managed to keep our Ryzen 9 7900X there without issue, and without compromising performance. We've already showed you in the Ryzen review how the Eco mode can do similar thermal tricks but at a significant performance hit. To be able to do this thermal taming with no loss in performance is almost witchcraft and is enough to award the ASUS ROG Strix X670E-F Gaming WiFi our OC3D Performance Award.