The Asus TUF Gaming X670E-Plus Wi-Fi is a socket AM5 ATX motherboard designed for AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors. The motherboard has the same industrial design that can be found across all of Asus’s TUF Gaming range of motherboards.

Although sitting one level below Asus’s enthusiast-level Republic of Gaming brand, TUF Gaming devices are still aimed at the more discerning PC gamer. Marketed as being robust, MIL-SPEC equipment, they tend to be fully featured and uncompromising gaming motherboards but at a more affordable price-point than the top-end ROG boards.

In the box is the motherboard, a magnetic Wi-Fi antenna, two SATA cables and three M.2 drive mounts + foam pads. As well as the comprehensive user guide, there’s a driver CD, a certificate of reliability, and a sheet of stickers.

Hopefully, we will see Asus finally move away from driver CDs to a thumb drive soon. If you don’t have a CD drive in your rig, more up-to-date drivers are available on the Asus website. In any case, Windows does a good job of accommodating the drivers until you get online and perform updates.

 

The board itself is weighty and feels solid. The black PCB and chunky heatsinks are a bold design that makes the TUF Gaming X670E-Plus Wi-Fi perfect for displaying in a windowed case. With only the tiniest bit of RGB lighting, it’s a board that looks like it means business rather than just being showy.

The integrated I/O panel at the back and solid heatsink to hold onto make installing the board in even the tightest of ATX cases a breeze. The holes matched up perfectly with my case. The AM5 heatsink mount makes installing a cooler on top of a Ryzen CPU a painless operation compared to the faffing about around the back needed with Intel boards.

The board’s AMD X670 chipset offers users more feature options than those with the cheaper AMD B650 chips. Most notable is PCIe 5.0 support for both the GPU and NVMe.

 

There are only three PCIe slots, 1x PCIe 5.0 x16, 2x PCIe 4.0 x16 and 1x PCIe 4.0 x4. Unlike many boards, these are sensibly spaced and not blocked by even my reasonably chunky Radeon GPU.

Also sensibly spaced for easy access, and utilising Asus’s screwless Q-Latches, are four M.2 slots. These support M.2 (Key M) devices, type 2242/2260/2280, with one slot up to 22110. M.2_1 supports PCIe 4.0 x4 with two slots supporting PCIe 4.0 x4 and one supporting both PCIe 3.0 and SATA. There are also four SATA 6Gb/s ports, two of which share bandwidth with the PCIe 3.0 M.2 slot.

The above affords system builders plenty of scope for expansion and lots of space for NVMe SSDs including an extra-fast PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD. Whilst slow to increase, the number of Windows 11 Direct storage games is growing making fast NVMe drives even more of a worthwhile investment.

The M.2 heatsinks are integrated into the board design for three of the M.2 slots (the PCIe 5.0 being one of them). It is good to have one open M.2 drive for use with SDDs that have integrated heatsinks.

There are four DDR5 DIMM sockets supporting up to 128GB. These use Asus’s proprietary Q-DIMM clasps, with clips only at the top. I’m not a great fan as it is easy to incorrectly seat the RAM modules, which brings me to the next feature on this Asus motherboard.

I’ve been building PCs for twenty-five years. Whilst I have a nigh-on 100% success rate when pressing the “on” button for the first time, there will always be times when things don’t go to plan. With this build, whilst the machine switched on, the RGB lit up, and the fans ran, there was no signal to the monitor. Thankfully there was no need to panic.

The TUF Gaming X670E-Plus Wi-Fi’s Q-LEDs offer system builders a bit of a helping hand, a far cry from the illegible beeps of yesteryear. A quick check of the motherboard and I could see the yellow DRAM Q-LED was still illuminated. Taking the modules out and reseating did nothing. I tested the RAM on another machine, and it ran fine. Armed with an air duster, I blew out the slots, reinserted the RAM, pressed the on button and the machine booted without issue. It doesn’t matter how many PCs you’ve built; you’ll always get the odd gremlin.

The motherboard audio is via a Realtek S1220A chip supporting 7.1 Surround Sound. There are output jacks for headphones, mic, and line out on the I/O panel, along with rear and sub jacks. There’s a header on the board for headphones and mic jacks on the front of your case. If you want to use the CPU’s integrated graphics the I/O panel also has an HDMI 2.1 port, that supports up to 4K@60Hz, and a DisplayPort 1.4, which supports 8K@60Hz.

The on-board features are capped off by a massive number of USB ports. There are ten USB ports on the rear, 1x USB-Type C 3.2 Gen 2×2, 4x USB 3.2 Gen 2 (3x Type-A and 1x Type-C), and 5 USB Type A Gen 1 ports. There are headers for nine USB on the front of the case, if supported, 1x USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1, and 3x USB 2.0 headers sporting up to six USB 2.0 ports.

Every time I use an Asus device, be it a laptop, motherboard, or even the ROG Ally handheld gaming PC, the Asus standardised UEFI BIOS is a breath of fresh air. At the heart of any PC set-up, the BIOS menu allows users to tweak settings on the board independent of the operating system that loads afterwards.

With the X670E-Plus (as with most motherboards) the memory timing needs to be correctly set in the BIOS to get the most out of your DDR5 modules. This involves applying a sort of factory overclock, which for AMD hardware is called DOCP (or Direct Overclock Profile). It’s the same as Intel’s XMP memory setting. The BIOS menu’s EZ settings have this on the front page with the CPU information so if that’s all you want to add you don’t have to delve in deeper.

There’s also a PBO Enhancement (Precision Boost Overdrive) tuning setting on the front page of the EZ settings page, which may get more out of your CPU. In the past, I’ve had limited success applying such an overclock to my test Ryzen 9 7950X and it was the same with this board. I tend to have better luck squeezing a little more out of Ryzen CPUs using the board’s advanced settings. Even then, the already superb PCMark10 score increased by very little.

As with Intel’s top-end CPUs, there’s more headroom in AMD’s lower-end Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 CPUs when it comes to casual overclocking. If you have the time, the X670E-Plus has all the settings you need to tweak your setup. And that is the beauty of this motherboard, from a budding system builder’s point of view.

The TUF Gaming X670E-Plus Wi-Fi is another Asus motherboard that was a pleasure to install and set up. A well-written user guide, Asus’s Q-system latches and LEDs take the pain out of the process. If you build or buy a gaming PC with this board, even though it’s been out for a while, now, you are going to have a robust machine that will last you a good few years before it’s time for an upgrade.