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.
