ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi

Is the ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi worth buying?

The ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi is worth the £189 if a Ryzen 9 is going into the socket, because 17 power stages rated at 80A each give more headroom than any other AM5 board on this list, and 423 owners rate it 4.5. It is the wrong buy for a Ryzen 5 build, where a £127.99 board feeds the chip just as well and the extra current never gets used.

The board takes Ryzen 9000, 8000 and 7000 processors on socket AM5 with DDR5 memory, runs 17 USB ports and one Ethernet port, and carries Windows 11 as its platform. Buy it when the processor is the expensive part of the build and you want the power delivery to outlast it.

What do 17 stages of 80A mean for a gaming build?

Divide the £189.00 across the 14+2+1 stages and each one costs £11.12, which is the figure to hold against any other AM5 board you are weighing up. Add the amperage together and the delivery is rated for 1,360A, far beyond what a game pulls and exactly the reserve a 16-core chip wants when it holds its boost clock for an hour.

An 8-layer PCB sits under that delivery, fed by a pair of 8+8 pin ProCool connectors with alloy chokes and durable capacitors. The enlarged VRM heatsink covers the stages, and DDR5 memory runs to 8,000 MHz through the four slots, so a fast kit is never the thing holding the build back.

What comes in the box and what do you buy separately?

The I/O shield arrives already mounted, so nothing has to be pressed into the rear panel by hand. In the box you get an M.2 Q-Latch for each drive, a PCIe Slot Q-Release button that frees the graphics card without a screwdriver, a Q-Antenna for the wireless, Q-Dashboard, Q-LED and BIOS FlashBack for recovering a failed update, and the whole board weighs 1.3 kg with the enlarged heatsink fitted.

Three M.2 slots take the storage, one at PCIe 5.0 and two at PCIe 4.0, and each sits under its own heatsink beside the PCH heatsink. The processor, the DDR5 modules and the drives are bought separately, the graphics card goes into the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, and a front-panel USB 10 Gbps Type-C header is what feeds a case port. Three addressable Gen 2 headers run Aura Sync lighting if you want the inside lit.

Where does the ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi fall short?

There is no USB4 port on the rear panel. The fastest connection back there is a USB 20 Gbps Type-C, and USB4 comes only through the onboard Thunderbolt header, which means buying an expansion card before that standard is any use to you.

The Realtek Ethernet runs at 2.5Gb, a step behind the 5 Gbps port on the MSI B850 Gaming Plus WiFi, and Wi-Fi 7 only pays off with a router that speaks it; on an older network the board drops back to whatever the router offers. The 1,360A of power delivery is also far more than a Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 ever asks for in a game, so a smaller chip pays for headroom it never touches.

At £189 this is the dearest board in this comparison, and nothing in the box changes that for a mid-range build.

How does it compare with the MSI B850 Gaming Plus WiFi and the ASUS TUF Gaming B650-Plus WiFi?

The MSI B850 Gaming Plus WiFi costs £144.98, which is £44.02 less than the ASUS TUF Gaming B850-Plus WiFi, and carries 12 power stages against 17 while adding Wi-Fi 7, a 5 Gbps LAN port, a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and three M.2 connectors. Take the MSI when the newest networking matters more than the stage count and a Ryzen 7 is doing the work; take this board when the chip has 16 cores and the delivery has to match it.

The ASUS TUF Gaming B650-Plus WiFi is £127.99, £61.01 below this one, with 14 stages at £9.14 each, a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, USB4 support and Wi-Fi 6, and it suits a Ryzen 7 build on a tighter budget. Step up to £189 only when the processor needs every amp the board can hand it.