ASUS TUF X470 Plus Gaming
A motherboard for a new family of brands.
On the surface, the Asus TUF X470Plus Gaming looks to be a low-end board with Asus branding slapped onto it. Fortunately, the frugal facade is misleading, as this TUF motherboard performs quite well, making it a good overall product and a great foundation for an AMDbased TUF Alliance gaming build.
Asus hopes to create a combined family of brands with the TUF Gaming Alliance, which the company officially unveiled at Computex 2018. Being the focal point to the alliance (and the original home of the TUF branding), Asus is, in some ways, putting its reputation on the line with the TUF brand.
The back panel of the TUF board is efficient -- to put it nicely. Asus has gone out of its way to cut off excess connections, and includes only three analogue audio ports, two USB 2.0, three USB 3.1 Gen1, two USB3.1 Gen2, gigabit, and a PS/2 port.
Unfortunately, the USB 3.1 Gen1 ports consist of two Type-A and one Type-C. Ideally, since USB-C is a future-looking port, the Type-C port should be of the faster USB 3.1 Gen2 variety. Then again, there’s very little that would take useful advantage of the faster port today. For builders with Ryzen APUs who won’t be plugging in a graphics card, DVI-D and HDMI 1.4b connectors are available for plugging in displays. If your monitor is DisplayPort only, you’ll need an adapter.
Asus introduces its own twist on the X470 chipset with this board, by changing up the PCIe wiring. The TUF board employs a single PCIe Gen3 slot running at a flat x16 mode, which is atypical. Beyond Gen3 PCIe, the second x16 slot is PCIe Gen2, and wired for x4 mode. The three x1 connectors enable lower-bandwidth devices.
Storage wise, this X470 motherboard places a 42/60/80/110mm M.2 NVMe slot above the primary TUF PCIe connector and a secondary 42/60/80mm M.2 port wired for two lanes of PCIe 3.0 below the chipset. The standard six SATA3 ports are scattered across the bottom-right quadrant of the board.
The TUF board’s audio design implements a Realtek ALC 887 codec, with the inclusion of DTS Custom hardware for headphone/ headset output.
The fact that the Asus UEFI is largely unchanged from its more expensive sibling boards is a great value.The company even goes the extra step to make the UEFI more visually similar to the motherboard itself, which we’ve knocked Gigabyte for in the past. As underappreciated the UEFI can be, this reviewer gives Asus an A+ in effort and execution here. 1
The Tuf X470-Plus Gaming doesn’t appear to be a good overclocking performer. Fortunately, the Asus UEFI is a great asset for builders, and all of the options we typically see in higher-end boards are enabled for us to potentially push this 6-phase board to the edge.
As a value-targeted board, it succeeds in areas that our previous-generation Biostar X370 GT7 board didn’t. Asus delivers a a well-rounded mainstream board with enough performance and polish to compete in this crowded budget board space.
This board is designed specifically to be paired with other TUF components, and we think it hits all the right marks for a great base-level gaming rig. ESports enthusiasts tend to emphasize performance, aesthetics, and value. And the Asus TUF X470-Plus Gaming checks those boxes.