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 Z890-Plus Wifi did well, in fact, it performed a little faster than the Aorus Pro Ice. Gaming performance was in line with one being higher, one being lower, and one with the same frame rate. Then for the network testing the TUF Gaming Z890-Plus Wifi performed well on the wired test coming in at 2496.6 Mbits/sec for the 2.5G NIC. The wireless performance on the other hand wasn’t as good in comparison to the Aorus board but was around where most Asus boards have been testing on our non-Wifi 7 network. The reason for the performance gap on wireless comes down to the TUF Gaming Z890-Plus Wifi having 160 MHz wireless support whereas the Aorus board, being a higher-end board, has 320 MHz and it shows in the performance even with our wireless network being limited to 160 MHz, not 320 MHz.

Before finishing up my testing I did want to check out the lighting but the TUF Gaming Z890-Plus Wifi does just have one small spot of lighting up above the 24-pin motherboard power. They have three underglow LEDs with a translucent pixelated TUF in the PCB above them so that it glows slightly. I would love to see the underglows all across the board rather than having it all in one spot. But the TUF look doesn’t really need lighting at all and I’m surprised they included it.

I also ran the 286K using AIDA64’s CPU stress test with the FPU workload for a half hour to heat up the VRMs to get a look at how well the heatsinks were handling things there. The TUF Gaming Z890-Plus Wifi was 51.3c in the hottest area which was up in the corner between the CPU and both of the rows of VRMs. The top heatsink ran warmer than the left heatsink which given that it is smaller makes sense but does tell us that the two heatsinks weren’t transferring heat much between them like they would with a heatpipe. There was a little heat in the chipset heatsink but not much, so the covered heatsink wasn’t an issue there and beyond that most of the heat was in that large heatsink for the M.2 which was running nearly as warm as the VRM heatsinks.