Introduction

If you’ve been waiting for a cheaper way to jump onto Intel’s Core Ultra bandwagon, then today sees the embargo lifting for B860 motherboard reviews for those that don’t care about overclocking. Of course AMD has the advantage of allowing overclocking support to filter down to cheaper chipsets as well as the recently released B850, plus it’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D has outsold practically everything else combined and clearly eclipses Intel too by a wide margin. Still, despite mediocre reviews and recent updates not quite turning the tide for Intel, for die hard Intel fans, today is a big day and first out of the starting blocks is the ASUS ROG Strix B860-A Gaming Wi-Fi.

Cheaper Intel Core Ultra 200 CPUs have been announced at CES last week and should be available in the market soon. Coupled with the fact they’re far less hot-running and power hungry than their predecessors, performance aside, cheaper motherboards and lower cooling costs should make the platform a little more attractive. Of course, everything depends on the price and this was still to be confirmed as we were writing this, but one of the more high-end options such as this likely won’t leave you with much change from $400. Needless to say there will be much cheaper B860 options out there than this one. Anyone looking for a motherboard for a clean, white build will clearly want to add it to their shortlist, while those with dark cases may want to consider the ROG Strix B860-F Gaming Wi-Fi instead. They’re essentially the same, except the board we’re looking at today shuns Thunderbolt 4 support in favor of USB4. In many ways, B860 is similar to the gap between B850 and X870, in that there are some overlaps in technology such as Wi-Fi 7 and PCIe Gen 5 support, but here at least PCIe Gen 5 is limited to the primary x16 slot and a single M.2 port. Stepping up to Z890 will in general get you more M.2 PCIe Gen 5 capable ports as well as Thunderbolt 4 as standard.

You get the same large heatsink for PCIe Gen 5 SSDs as you do on other ASUS boards with the PCBs of its AMD Socket AM5 and Intel LGA1851 boards sporting very similar features. In terms of LGA1851, our system is fully up-to-date so includes the various performance fixes we saw announced by Intel in recent weeks, and we’ll be churning out more boards for Core Ultra 200 CPUs over the rest of this month too.

Specifications