Moving along as I check out a variety of the X870 and X870E motherboards that Asus has launched today. I first took a look at the Asus TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi, now we move on to check out something from their ROG lineup. This board is the ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi and is the first X870E board I am testing. Being from their ROG line, the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi starts to die into some of Asus’s overclocking-specific features without going completely off the deep end like some of their even higher-end boards like the Crosshair X870E Hero which moves past the Strix brand and into the full ROG. I’m curious to see what Asus has to offer for someone looking to go high-end, but maybe not the highest end. So let's dive in and see what the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi is all about!

Product Name: ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi

Review Sample Provided by: Asus

Written by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Packaging and Accessories

When it comes to packaging styling, Asus has always been consistent. That is especially true with anything from the ROG line. The box for the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi of course has the red background and the red ROG logo up in the top left corner. Asus puts the model name across the front in a flashy reflective finish as well but my favorite part is that they use actual pictures of the board on the front. I don’t shop in retail often for PC parts, but who would want to not see what you are getting? In this case, though, you know Asus is proud of what they made and want to show it off. The rest of the background has the different ROG logos all lightly visible on the black part of the background. Then down at the bottom, they highlight that this board has Wifi 7, Dolby Atmos, and of course Asus’s Aura Sync lighting. Then in the bottom right corner, you have the AMD required branding which includes the chipset name and shows that this is an AMD Ryzen AM5 motherboard and that it is PCIe 5.0 ready. On the back, there are a lot more pictures including a full shot of the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi along with one that shows part of the back of the board as well. They also touch on a few features with four more pictures and have a picture of the rear I/O. Alongside that, you get a basic specification listing which most importantly does have the board dimensions along with important things to note if shopping in retail like the M.2 slots, memory support, and CPU supported.

When you open up the box, the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi comes wrapped in its static protective bag and it sits in a cardboard tray. It isn’t hidden behind any other cardboard inserts, however. Under that main tray, you will find two covered compartments and in the center a spot for the documentation and also an ROG keychain. For documentation, you get a full-color quick start guide that is specific to the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi. I hate that I have to say that, but a lot of boards come with a universal guide or sometimes one that covers a list of boards. You get a paper telling you about Asus Webstorage and then a foiled sticker sheet with a variety of ROG-themed stickers.

Premium boards like the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi stand out against the crowd when you start to get into the different accessories that they come with. Even the previously mentioned keychain isn’t something you would get with all boards. You get a few more things here than we saw on the TUF board but you do get the same wireless antenna. This design is used for all of the Asus boards and has a black plastic finish and a flip-out design. The base has rubber on it and a magnet inside that lets you stick it onto your case or desk if they are steel to get the antenna up and get the best possible signal. This design does have the new snap on connections versus the screw-on design that has been around forever and it’s a small detail but it does make installation a lot easier. What else do you get? There are a few small baggies, that have the M.2 rubbermounting pads and extra screws. There is a thermal pad for longer M.2 drives in its own bag, that one has a note explaining what it is and a picture showing where it goes which is nice. You get a bag of black zip ties which we don’t normally see with a motherboard but is a nice addition and a bag with two black SATA cables. The one thing that most people won’t know about however is the bag with the M.2 Q-Slides. These work with the slide railing on the M.2 1/2/3 slots and are a toolless way to install M.2 drives of any size where often a toolless design requires a tool to remove and move if you are using anything but the standard 2280 length M.2 drive.

Board Layout and Pictures

Where the TUF board was simple on features but big on its unique brand of styling. The Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi is big on features and styling together. The entire board is blacked out with a few things printed on some of the heatsinks. But where the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi stands out is the machined Strix logo on the chipset cooler and the titanium-looking cover on the heatsinks below the CPU socket. They also have an RGB backlit ROG logo over the rear I/O. It isn’t as extreme as ROG’s highest en board with heatsinks that cover the entire board, but the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi isn’t far behind with nearly everything covered.

For VRMs, the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi has an 18+2+2 configuration which is a step above the Aorus and TUF boards with each stage rated at 110A whereas on the TUF for example it is 80A. Then to keep things cool it has a significantly larger cooler for those as well. That consists of two aluminum heatsinks, one above the CPU socket and one to the left. They are tied together with a thick heatpipe and the larger left heatsink is large enough that it also integrates in with the rear I/O and is then covered with the RGB backlit ROG logo. Down in the bottom right corner, the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi has a low-profile heatsink that handles the chipset. Then the rest of the heatsinks which there are a lot of are all there for cooling the five M.2 slots. The cool brushed metal cover over the one at the top has the ROG and Strix branding stamped in it with tiny cutouts. This is installed with two screws and covers up the top M.2 slot. Below that are two more, the one on the left is also held in place with screws but the one on the right is interesting because it is larger and has a toolless design that pops right up. Then the last two M.2 drives are up under the low-profile heatsink to the left of the chipset cooler.

Starting in the top left corner of the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi I’m going to check out what the board has for visible features section by section. A good portion of this section is filled with the rear I/O and the cover/VRM heatsinks as well as the CPU socket. Like with most boards, it does still have the CPU power tucked away up in the top corner though. For the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi, you can see that it has metal shielding around it and solid pins. This is what Asus calls Dual Procool II designed to help keep things cool and keep the connection from melting.

Moving over to the top right quadrant we start to get a lot of stuff going on. The biggest thing here are the four DDR5 DIMMs which are all black to match the rest of the board. One thing to note here is that Asus is running their new NitroPath DRAM tech on the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi. This uses shorter gold fingers on all of the pins aiming to cut down noise interference to have better stability and speed when overclocking ram. They also note that the new design improved the latching force as well. Up above the RAM the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi has four 4-pin PWM fan headers and interestingly all of them come with rubber covers on them. Having the main CPU header not covered would have been nice to make it even easier to spot, especially because here they have a label printed but it is partially up under the VRM heatsink and hard to see. Next to that, you have small LED boot status lights paired up with a two-digit display as well to show the status or errors. Next to that is the first addressable RGB header and then the start button. Below that is the small Flexkey button, this can be set to do different functions depending on what you need. Then below that is the 24-pin motherboard power. Below the power is a newer USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 front panel USB connection as well as an older style USB 3.2 Gen 2 USB connection. Last up on the right side here is the push button for the toolless M.2 slot.

In the bottom right quadrant starting along the right edge, you get a second USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 header, this time with it sitting at a right angle to face off of the right side of the board. Next to it is a match set of SATA ports as well giving you four SATA ports in total. Can we just reflect by the way how years ago four SATA ports on a high-end board would be crazy talk but with M.2 4 is on the high end of what most gaming-focused boards will have. Once you get down to below the chipset heatsink things start to get busy around. There are a few small two-pin headers and one triple-pin. The triple pin is the CPU overclock jumper that you need to move to get into extreme overclocking settings in the BIOS and next to that is a thermal sensor header. In the bottom corner, there is a chassis intrusion header then the front panel connection. You get the CMOS battery and then two more 4-pin fan headers. There is another header which I assume is for Asus’s diagnosing things because it is unlabeled then there are three USB 2.0 headers.

Continuing with the bottom edge we have two more addressable RGB headers, totaling three but zero older 4-pin RGB headers and one last PWM fan header as well. That totals up to 8 in total when including the pump-specific headers as well. Then on the left, you have the front panel audio connection. This has the isolated PCB around it which leads up around the whole sound circuitry on the left side. The Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi has what they call ROG SupremeFX 7.1 Surround Sound and is running the ALC4080 CODEC. They have impedance sense for both the front and rear audio outputs and it has a 120 dB SNR stereo playback output and 110 dB SNR recording input. It also has a Savitech SV3H712 AMP as well. Most of this corner is dominated by the PCIe slots as well as the M.2 slots so let's dive into the details for all of those. You have two x16 length PCIe slots but only the top slot supports x16 mode. That top slot is a PCIe 5.0 slot as well and runs directly off of the CPU whereas the bottom slot is PCIe 4.0 and has 4x lanes and runs off of the X870E chipset. Then there are five M.2 slots in total, three of those run off of the CPU and support PCIe 5.0 x4 if your CPU supports it. The other two are on the chipset and are PCIe 4.0 x4. M.2_2 and M.2_3 share bandwidth with the main PCIe slot, when those are used it will drop the main PCIe slot from x16 down to x8 lanes. Also to note here, the main PCIe slot does have metal support all around it to add to its strength. It also has a new Q-Release design. In the past, Asus introduced the push button release and now everyone is doing it. This new design is called Q-Release Slim and they have it on all of their X870 ROG and ProArt boards. Basically, they removed the button and you just hold the motherboard and tilt your GPU up starting at the rear I/O end and it will unlatch the lock and lift. I was initially worried that the button was gone, but this design seems to be spring-loaded and takes up less room, I hope it works well.

The rear I/O on the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi has a textured black finish on the pre-installed backplate. On the far left it starts with the boards one onboard display output, an HDMI port. From there the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi is packed full of USB connections. In total, it has 13 on the rear I/O. Four of those are Type-C with two of those being USB 4.0, one is USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 and has PD fast charge to ouput up to 30 watts of charging power, and the last is a USB 3.2 Gen 2. There are 9 Type-A connections and those are all fast 10G USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports as well. In the middle of all of those USB ports, there are two small buttons, one is the clear CMOS button and the other is the BIOS reflash button that lets you use a thumb drive to update the BIOS without a CPU or RAM installed in the board. This is helpful later in life when there are new CPUs and you need a BIOS update to support them. There is just one ethernet connection and the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi has stepped up above the 2.5G we saw on the TUF and Aorus boards with a 5GbE Realtek NIC. I would have preferred to see a 10G NIC, but that is a feature focused on the ProArt board whereas the gaming-focused boards have 2.5G and 5G depending on the board. Next to that are the two antenna connections for the Wifi 7 wireless NIC as well. Then on the far right the audio connections are similar to what we saw on the Aorus board with an in and an out along with an optical connection.

The back of the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi does of course show off the black PCB but on top of that they have the Strix branding and ROG logos printed on top in grey. This is also where they have all of the required certification logos hidden away to keep the top of the board looking clean.

BIOS

Rather than have stacks of pictures I put together a basic video that just goes through and clicks on each menu option in the BIOS so if there is anything you want to check out you can see it and pause when needed. The BIOS for the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi opened up on the EZ-Mode page which is good to see. Often this is the only page a user will need to visit and that is because you can check to make sure your memory is picked up, check the status of fans, turn on XMP or Expo for your memory, and change the boot priority. Asus even makes that last one easy to do with drag and drop. You can also use a simple EZ system tuning option here for a basic overclock as well and get into QFan to tune your fan profiles. Even as a power user, this is all I will dive into on a lot of builds. None of this is any different from what we saw on the TUF board other than the ROG styling in the background.

You can then go to the advanced mode down on the bottom to get to other BIOS features. This is what you would expect from a traditional BIOS, only you can still use a mouse and navigate things. I do have to say that both in the EZ Mode and Advanced mode, they are looking better. Asus has upgraded to HD resolutions and it shows! The landing page here is the Main tab and this shows your BIOS version and CPU and you can change the language and time. Next up however is the Ai Tweaker which these days might make you think it is AI related, but this is Asus’s normal name for their overclocking settings. Here you can set the main overclocking settings all right up at the top. Then as you scroll down you start to get into the more detailed options. The overall look is the same as the TUF board a majority of what you will see is the same other than the ROG red background/theming. The only exception to that is the Extreme Over-voltage option which can't be turned on until you jump the CPU_OV jumper on the board. The only thing missing really, and this is something I have said for a while now. But I feel like the AMD CPU-specific pages like the AMD CBS menu should also be in the Ai Tweaker section but you will find all of those under the advanced tab. Speaking of that tab this is where you will get into setting pages for all of the features on the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi. You have PCI subsystem pages, USB, networking, NVMe, SATA, Hard drive, and more all gathered up in this section.

From there the next tab is the Monitor section. This has pages for temperature monitoring, fan speed monitoring, voltage monitoring, and also the Q-Fan tool’s options which is always a little weird that those aren’t just on the Q-Fan page. The Boot tab is exactly what you would expect, all of the startup options including changing your boot order, fast bootup, and similar options. Last up is the Tool page. This is where useful tools like Asus Secure Erase for wiping hard drives are hidden away. You also have the EZ Flash 3 utility for BIOS flashing and a few other cool tools like Q-Dashboard that lets you see a picture of the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi and mouse over things to see what it is and its status. On the far right side on all of the advanced mode pages you have CPU details like frequency, temperature, BCLK speed, and information on the prediction settings are all shown. Then up top, there are a few options always available like the Aura lighting options to turn all lighting off, ReSize BAR setting, and QFan which opens up and lets you tune your fan profiles. Then at the end, when you save any changes you have made are all listed. This is big if you are just exploring and changing something without noticing that you did it.

Test Rig and Procedures

Test System

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D – Live Pricing

Cooling: Corsair H100i RGB Platinum - Live Pricing

Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing

   Memory:    G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5 16GBx2 6000MHz - Live Pricing

Storage:    Kingston FURY Renegade 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD- Live Pricing

Video Card: Nvidia RTX 4090 FE - Live Pricing

Power Supply: Corsair AX1200 - Live Pricing

Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing

OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing

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 Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi I have compared it against the Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite Wifi7 that I previously tested as well as the Asus TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi. This just gives us a comparison point to make sure things are still in line and the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi was in line with what I saw with the TUF Gaming board but a little below the Aurus. It was better when it came to the gaming, however, improving on both boards slightly in two of the three tests.

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 Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi and its wireless performance was in the same ballpark but a hair lower than the two other boards but its 5GbE NIC helped on its wired performance significantly doubling up the performance compared to the two other boards tested.

I also wanted to check out the lighting on the ROG Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi. The only location was the large backlit ROG logo sitting up over the top of the rear I/O. I would have liked to have seen some underglow lighting around the board to spread the lighting out a little more, but this does look good. Beyond that, you just have the status LEDs in the top right corner and the post/error code display in that same corner.

In my testing, I also ran AIDA64’s CPU stress test using the FPU workload. I ran this for a half hour and got a few thermal images of the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi to see how it was handling things. The heatsinks for the VRM had the heat evenly spread out. There was a little heat transferred into the PCB but it was less than on the TUF board which itself wasn’t bad at all. The hottest spot ended up being on the bottom edge right up against the M.2 slot where less airflow could reach but things ran cool.

Overall and Final Verdict

While the TUF Gaming X870-Plus Wifi had a unique styling, the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi is a lot more up my alley with its styling. The combination of everything being blacked out and simple along with that stamped and cutout cover on the top M.2 heatsink that almost looks like it is made of titanium it’s a good look. The Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi also stands out with the sheer number of connection options you get, both on the rear I/O and inside. For the rear I/O, I was blown away at the number of fast USB ports available. It isn’t crazy to see a lot of USB ports on a board, but often a chunk of those are older USB 2.0 speeds and sometimes base USB 3.2 Gen 1 speeds but with the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi you get 10 USB 3.2 Gen 2 speed ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, and two of the new USB 4.0 ports and that doesn’t count the number of USB connections you can add in with the internal headers. You won’t want for fan headers and you also get three addressable RGB headers. The only thing missing for me was at least one of the older 4-pin RGB headers, I still run into a lot of devices that use those and it would be nice to be able to control those without having to run another controller. You get a lot of M.2 slots but what impressed me the most was the M.2 cooling. All five M.2 slots had solid cooling which is important with PCIe 4 and 5 M.2 drives. Asus has also gotten creative with their M.2 mounting including the flexible slot toolless mounting and the push button release on one of the heatsinks and the snap in match for the M.2 drive inside under that heatsink.

The only other things I would change about the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi is that like with the other X870 boards I’ve tested so far, the RGB lighting is all clumped in one area. I would also love to see the possibility of a 10 GbE NIC on these higher-end gaming boards. I understand why Asus focuses that on their ProArt line and frankly, I am in the minority to have a 10GbE network at all. But if you are going to have support for 5GbE you will most likely also be able to run 10GbE on your network. The 5GbE connection seems like a half-step to me. I’m hoping however it is more reliable than what we have seen with the 10GbE onboard NICs so far.

The Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi has an MSRP of $499.99 which firmly puts it up into the higher-end range and isn’t going to be for everyone. That said, Asus is justifying the pricing by loading the Strix X870E-E Gaming Wifi with features. For comparison this is in line with the X870E Aorus Master from Gigabyte and Asus is a step above on things like the VRMs and connectivity. But if you are looking for a higher-end X870E board but aren’t willing to throw down for the Crosshair Hero then this is the board for you.

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.