Board Layout and Pictures
I mentioned earlier that I haven’t had a TUF motherboard in the office for years. I double-checked and that goes all the way back to 2013 which is crazy. Back then, the first few generations of TUF boards had a unique styling that covered the top and often the bottom of the motherboard up completely to protect it. This did of course have downsides when it came to cooling, but it did create a cool on-brand look that I thought was cool. Later though the TUF brand changed up and adopted the yellow which you still see here on this board in a few spots. They still had TUF-specific board features, but as far as styling went they took a step back from the initial look to something simpler. This new generation though, I’m digging the look even if it doesn’t fit my styling as much. The chrome TUF logo on top of the rear I/O and the semi-enclosed floating logo design on the chipset cooler reminds me of big truck brands. The chrome TUF especially fits this, it's like the large RAM logo on the back of some of the Ram trucks or the F-150 logo on an F-150 and that is really on brand with the idea of this being TUF. With this not being at the top of their product stack it doesn’t have crazy heatsinks covering the entire board, but they aren’t too far off. I will still always miss the cool military-like covers of the old original TUF boards, but I think this look is on point.
The TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi has a 16+2+1 VRM configuration sitting to the top and left of the CPU socket. With that, they have heatsinks over both rows. The left side is the larger of the two and that heatsink extends up and over the rear I/O and has that large chrome TUF logo on it. The top one is smaller and is smaller and shorter. Both do have groves machined into the sides to add to the surface area but I was surprised to see that they didn’t tie the two together with a heatpipe at all. It will be interesting to see if one of the two gets warmer later when I check out the thermals. Also for heatsinks, the chipset has a small low profile heatsink over it but they have covered it with a clear cover to give it that floating TUF logo on top so I don’t think they are too concerned with that warming up too much. Then to the left of that, there is one large black heatsink that sits over top of two M.2 slots. The third M.2 is then above that with its own heatsink sitting over the PCIe slot. These are all around your video card but at least that top one isn’t going to be sitting up under the video card when it gets hot.
Starting up in the top left corner, a majority of this quarter of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi is filled with the VRMs, CPU socket, the rear I/O, and the heatsinks keeping things cool. Asus does have the two 8-pin CPU power plugs hiding up there sitting just above the VRM heatsink. These are interestingly the only power ports not in black on this board, I wonder if Asus did this to make them at least a little visible up here, either way, though there isn’t anything else going on in this section.
For the top right quadrant, the four DDR5 DIMMS are filling up a lot of the inner space. They have done every other DIMM in black and that same grey here and Asus did label them letting you know which you should use first which is always helpful. Above the RAM there are three 4-pin PWM headers, one is black and is for an all-in-one coolers pump and the other two are for the CPU fan with one main one and one optional. Those fan headers are farther over than I would have expected, normally for air cooling the headers would still be over close to the CPU socket. Right next to those in the corner, Asus has put in a few small LEDs that are labeled, these give you a boot status to help with diagnosing boot issues. Then below that you have a white addressable RGB header and then the 24-pin motherboard power. Below the motherboard power, the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi has one front panel header for USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 speeds which supports 30-watt fast charging that they call PD 3.0, and one older USB 3.2 Gen 1 header. The TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi doesn’t miss anything you might need here, but it isn’t loaded up with extra features as well.
For the bottom right quadrant of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi, you start with a PCIe latch helper button and honestly, I almost missed this in my testing because it blends in. It is right below the USB 3 header. I’m happy to see that this feature was included, I’ve been spoiled with it on our test benches for a while now and it can prevent board damage when you are poking things down trying to press the latch when you have a large video card installed. Below that are two SATA ports which are right-angled and face out the side of the board. Then we skip down to the bottom right corner where they have the front panel connection. Next to that, the two-pin header is a chassis intrusion header and then you have another 4-pin PWM header, this one is also labeled for water pump use. The two-pin header next to that clears the CMOS then you have two more USB headers, this time USB 2.0. On down from there is one thermal sensor header and a debug communication header before you get two more addressable RGB headers totaling three but I should also note there aren’t any 4-pin standard RGB headers on the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi.
The bottom left quadrant is of course dominated by the PCIe and M.2 slots, as it should be. But before I get to them let's finish up the connections on the bottom edge. There is a serial COM header then three more 4-pin PWM fan headers. That totals up to 7 on the entire board which is more than average. Last up on the end is the front panel audio header. That sits in the isolated section on the end there along with the rest of the onboard audio. The TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi runs the Realtek ALC1220P 7.1 Surround Sound High Definition Audio CODEC. It has impedance sense for front and rear headphone outputs and an internal amplifier and they do have the audio chipset covered with a metal shield to help isolate it more alongside of the isolated PCB. For the PCIe connections, you get two in total and both are the full x16 length but only the top one supports x16. That slot is PCIe 5.0 on the CPUs that support it and supports bifurcation as well. The bottom slot runs only at x4 and is PCIe 4.0. Both slots do share lanes with M.2 slots, the main PCIe slot will drop down to x8 if you also use the M.2_2 slot and the bottom PCIe x4 slot will turn off when you run something in M.2_4 so keep that in mind. X870 has fewer lanes available than X870E and it shows here. For M.2 slots you have four in total with the top two being PCIe 5.0 x4 and running directly off of the CPU lanes whereas the bottom two are PCie 4.0 and run through the chipset. Three of those M.2 locations have cooling and the bottom one doesn’t.
The lower number of USB ports available on the X870 chipset in comparison to X870E is more noticeable here on the rear I/O of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi but that isn’t to say you won't have enough. You get 10 USB ports in total. Five of those are USB 3.2 Gen 1 and they are on the right side with the darker blue, Asus has those labeled as 5G USB which could get a little confusing for some (not that all USB naming isn’t confusing at this point). There are three Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, which have a lighter blue color. There is one USB 2.0 plug which is also the BIOS update port. Then two Type-C connections are USB 4 or 40G ports. They almost touched on every available USB speed but missed out on USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, but the USB 4 will cover that. I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more USB 2.0 plugs however, those can be nice for simple devices. You have one HDMI plug and on the left at the top a 2.5GbE ethernet plug. That runs on the Realtek 2.5G NIC. There are also two jacks for the included wireless antenna. They don’t list what wireless chipset this is on the specification, but it is MediaTek Wifi 7. Last up, on the right are the audio connections and the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi has more connections than the Aorus X870 board that I already took a look at today. You get the full array of jacks and they are color-coded but optical is missing. In place of optical, you have the BIOS flashback button that combined with the USB 2.0 port you can update the BIOS on the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi without having the RAM or CPU installed which is helpful later in life if the board doesn’t have a BIOS that supports a new CPU and you don’t have a newer CPU to do the update.
The back of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi shows off the black PCB but there isn’t too much going on back here. The only thing is the TUF Gaming branding printed across a majority of the back and this is also where they have hidden all of the required certification logos as well.
