Asus ROG Strix B850-FGaming WiFi
AMD boards are too expensive. Fact
B850 is supposed to be a budget chipset, yet this costs $300.
WE’VE WRITTEN extensively over these last few months about the slow creep of PC component pricing that’s occurred over the last decade or so. It’s been painful to watch, but if you take a look at the raw stats—certainly for CPUs and GPUs—it kind of lines up with inflation quite nicely (if not a little better, actually). In fact, most areas do, with one exception: motherboards.
This is the B850-FGaming WiFi from Asus. It’s a board built around AMD’s new B850 chipset. In short, we’ve now got three distinct chipsets available for the 9th gen (and its AM5 socket predecessors). X870E is the crème de la crème, top dog. To hit that criteria and label, it needs a minimum of 44 PCIe lanes (24 of which are 5.0), two USB 5Gbps ports, 12 USB 10Gbps ports, and two USB 20Gbps, along with capacity to handle up to eight PCIe 3.0 or SATA ports. For X870E PCIe 5.0, USB 4 and overclocking capacity are absolutely mandatory.