Performance

   When it comes to performance testing, typically motherboard to motherboard we aren’t going to see any big performance difference when running the same components and clock speeds. The exception to that is when boards are auto overclocking of course and there are a few areas where components can make a difference like with ethernet and USB controllers. For testing the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi I have compared it against the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wifi7 that I previously tested. This just gives us a comparison point to make sure things are still in line and the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi did come in just slightly behind in most of those tests but still in line with what you would expect.

The one area where motherboard testing does sometimes vary would be in the network testing and for that, I checked out both wired and wireless performance on the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi and once again both of these were right with the Aorus board as well, running a little faster on the wireless but otherwise on par.

In my testing, I did run into one small note that came up when setting things up. I’ve been a huge fan of the twist latches for M.2 drives that Asus has used. They stepped things up even more with a new snap-in clip design here. The only downside was that it was behind the heatsink that screwed down which some of their higher-end boards have creative ways to get around that.

I also took a look at the RGB lighting on the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi and this isn’t a board with a lot of lighting. But Asus did use more than I saw on the Aorus board. Even still, all of the RGB lighting was still focused on one area with underglow lighting up under the right side of the board and only on the bottom half. I am fine with lots of RGB or none at all, but if you are going to have it I would like to see a little more around the board. The only other LEDs were the status LEDs in the top right corner, but those played a different role.

Last up, I ran AIDA64’s CPU stress test on the FPU setting for over a half hour to heat things up so we could see what happens with the VRMs over time. I was initially concerned that the two different heatsinks not being tied together would have them at different temperatures but that didn’t happen too much. The PCB did soak up more heat than we saw with the Aorus board, that board had larger heatsinks than the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi. Overall though nothing was too hot or concerning.