Mid-Range Will Run You $310!
AMD’s new X870 chipset isn’t much of an upgrade from the previous design but it’s new features do make it attractive. These new boards, such as the ASUS TUF GAMING X870-Plus WiFi bring USB4 to the desktop as well as Gen5 PCIe for both add-in cards and M.2 storage but you won’t see any general improvements in performance compared to last generations chipset. The X870 has more PCIe lanes compared to the X670 as well, but not quite enough to feed everything on the board without making some sacrifices.
For instance, the ASUS TUF GAMING X870-Plus WiFi has a pair of PCIe 5.0 M.2 ports and two additional PCI-e 4.0 ports, however if you populate them all the primary PCIe slot drops from 16x to 8x and the second one will be disabled. With the right CPU you will have more flexibility than in the previous generation but you will still need to plan ahead.
The FPS Review were quite fond of the 16+2+1 80A power stages on this mid-range board, as well as the aluminium heatsinks on top of the hot components on the board. Setup was a breeze and apart from some challenges with tall heatsinks on M.2 storage they had no installation issues. Check out their detailed review for benchmarks.
