Asus TUF Z390-Plus Gaming

“The Asus outpaced the ASRock and MSI boards in Geekbench’s single-core test, and it was frugal at load”

SCORE PRICE £117 (£140 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk

Asus TUF boards promise enhanced durability with features that will appeal to inexperienced system builders. Reliability is improved by beefed-up capacitors and voltage regulator modules (VRMs) alongside chips that guard against electrostatic discharge. And Asus is confident too: note the five-year warranty.

They’re welcome features, but not extraordinary. The Asus’s main PCIe x16 slot is bolstered with steel, for instance, but every other board here offers that. And while the Z390-Plus Gaming has plenty of temperature sensors and five fan connectors, that’s not unusual.

The Asus has solid entry-level features: that top PCIe x16 slot is joined by four PCIe x1 slots, which are handy for numerous expansion cards. However, it only has three audio jacks, and there’s no room for USB-C 3.1 – unlike every other board here. You get onboard USB 2 and USB 3.1 headers, but no front-panel USB-C 3.1 connector. Other high-end options are missing, too. The second PCIe x16 slot only runs at 4x speed and the board doesn’t support Nvidia SLI, while the audio and Ethernet chipsets are both average. Then we come to performance. The Asus scored 237 and 278 in our video-editing and multitasking benchmarks, which are the poorest results here. Its Cinebench result of 1,478 is also the worst on test, albeit by only one point, while it propped up the table in Geekbench’s multicore test. Its 3D Mark Fire Strike result of 15,221 is slow, and it was inconsistent elsewhere – a great score of 102fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider was undermined by a disappointing 144fps average in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

Its result of 173 in our image-editing test is better than other boards, though, and its single-threaded memory performance and storage results are good. It outpaced the ASRock and MSI boards in Geekbench’s single-core test, and it was frugal at load.

That bodes well for basic computing, and the Asus TUF has the necessary features and a good warranty, but not much beyond that. As such, it’s suitable for entry-level builds and rigs where reliability is important, but you’ll get better performance with the MSI.

KEY SPECS 4 x 4,266MHz DDR4, max 64GB 2 x PCIe x16, 4 x PCIe x1 6 x USB 3.1, 2 x PS/2, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, 3 x audio 2 x M.2, 6 x SATA 3 5yr RTB warranty