ASUS TUF Gaming B650-PLUS WiFi Motherboard

The vast majority of PC users don’t need anything more fancy than this. Indeed, they don’t even need something as fancy as this. PCIe 5 is overkill and only the most extreme of GPU or parallel storage use cases will come even close to saturating those pipes. But, it does make this MB a candidate for future-proofing since AM5 is going to be supported by AMD for a while, PCIe 5 will unlock more usecases that software and hardware will take advantage of, and DDR5 will eventually come down in price. It’s certainly why I got it. I don’t want to upgrade my MB for the next 5 years or so and I think this is a good board to do that with.

The MB has a USB-C DisplayPort slot which is useful since most new monitors support it and it’s a lot easier to use than standard DP which you would presumably plug into your GPU.

The built-in sound card is good enough. I don’t have any objective way to measure it but I used to be a musician and the music I’m playing on my backup set of speakers sounds fine. The fact that my desk is too small for my massive monitors is the most glaring source of sound quality issues.

There’s a lot of drama around AMD’s AM5 chipset, fried CPUs, and an all-around mess. This board is no exception, but I haven’t had any big issues so far. There is a BIOS update (non-beta) to limit Vsoc to 1.3V, but that isn’t a complete fix for all issues identified so you should leave all settings default and auto and turn off the computer when you’re done with it.

DDR5 compatibility is quite low. Anecdotally, there are many who can’t get sticks on the QVL to work correctly, but I think the main issue is that they don’t work with EXPO or non-default settings. At regular speeds I got my sticks (Kingston 64GB 4800, KF548C38BBK2-64) to work. Maybe you will as well. It’s very apparent that ASUS had a hard time getting many of their AM5 boards to work with DDR5 sticks.

Product physical build quality seems high. It has a stiff heft to it that makes you think it’s quite solid. Of course, I don’t know how strong it actually is since I didn’t want to break it. The reinforced PCIe slot is welcome since I have bad memories in a previous build with a heavy GPU causing problems.

The front M.2 slot has some included heatsink and thermal pads which is useful if you have a really high speed SSD you need to cool down. I don’t think it’s necessary for PCIe 3 SSDs, but it’s probably needed for PCIe 4 and 5 ones if you have high utilization (no idea how a casual person would achieve this, but it might happen).

The back M.2 slot is just a slot with a Q-latch which is just a captive screw with an extra semi-circle of material to latch the M.2 stick in. Nothing fancy, doesn’t need to be.

One issue I had with installation was that my GPU’s backplate made it impossible to use all of the front panel wires since there was not enough space to accommodate the plugs. I still had enough to handle the Power LED and Power Button, but left the others unused for convenience.

Again and again I had crashes with this board, replaced the video card (regret there, but it seemed like that was the problem). Audio hissing and pops, okay, fine- typical from realtek, but it even made noise when the machine was *off*. Eventually this motherboard determined the CPU was bad, and refused to boot. Checking online, reseating the CPU might solve the problem. So I did (which means more wasted thermal paste), and then, finally it determined that the issue was I had USB power overloads. Even when I unplugged EVERY USB device on the the board. It just wouldn’t boot. I spent over a month and am now outside my return window.

The solution? I bought an ASRock motherboard and it’s been fine. This product is trash, and ASUS should be ashamed for making it. I’ve been building computers since 1988, and this is by far the worst experience I’ve ever had. Absolute junk. And the ASRock board? Not only does it “just work”, it’s got a 100% better UI for the BIOS. ASUS bios still feels like it’s 1990..

I would not recommend. I don’t even know what to do with this trash. This *probably* cost me $400 because of me not knowing WHAT exactly is wrong; I spent $1200 on a GPU and based on it constantly crashing, I went all out and spent $1700 on another, then the board just decided a permanent reboot loop at 15 seconds due to USB issues (with NO usb plugged in) was how it wanted to go.

Maybe I just got a bad board, but if you google ASUS motherboard, I sure don’t seem to be the only one. 100% money wasted

Edit: sent to ASUS for repair, they refuse warranty repair claiming there is a bent CPU pin, which is somehow my fault. They want $130 to repair it, at which point they will send a replacement. I didn’t bend it, it came that way. I can’t even imagine what you could do to bend one (1) pin and not affect any of the ones around it. So apparently they aren’t QCing their boards and blame the customer. I’m 100% out the $220 I spent on this board, they wanted to kick it up to $350, and on top of that, I had to pay $25 to send it in for an RMA they denied. Do not do business with ASUS. I’ll be looking into litigation over this one.

Running a 7900x3D with Neo-Z memory at 6200 with tighter timings with no problem at all. The board is rock solid, really stable, well built, and comes with plenty of accessories in the box. The only ‘downside’ that you need to be aware of is that the front NVME requires some sort of engineering to make it flat; otherwise, only using the manual instructions (rubber), the NVME still gets a bit bent

Me encantó! Los tonos grises de los disipadores hacen buen contraste con los blancos.
Llevo casi un mes con ella, la estoy usando con un procesador AMD 5 7600X y de momento una gráfica RX 7600.
Todo funciona perfectamente.
Tiene bastantes puertos de expansión y buena cantidad de puertos para RGB.
Ojalá contara con al menos dos puertos PCIE 5 M.2 pero todo lo demás lo compensa.
Siendo Asus ROG, el BIOS cuenta con amplias opciones de configuración y cabe destacar que cuanta con BIOS flashback lo que facilita la actualización y recuperación del bios en caso de una mala actualización.

Esta motherboard me parece una excelente opción para el precio que tiene, tiene soporte para la gen 7000 y por supuesto lo q mas necesitaba son muchos puertos nvme.

Si lo q quieres es armar una pc gama alta con el menor presupuesto, esta es tu opción