Asus B550 STRIX F & TUF PLUS Review

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These Asus B550 boards, the STRIX F and TUF PLUS are both pretty impressive, well built boards that, much like most B550 boards are pretty expensive, but they supposedly offer a rather unique feature, so lets take a look and see if they are worth it over the other options on the market, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!

Lets start with the important bit, the CPU power delivery. It’s beefy, on both. Seriously, even the supposedly budget TUF board features an 8+2 phase setup, and the STRIX, well that’s just insane, at 12+2. Both use SiC639 drivers rated at 50A each, meaning it can, hypothetically, deliver up to 720W at 1.2V to the CPU – bare in mind the 3950X uses less that 150W. As you’d expect with that level of overbuilt VRMs, they both ran cool in testing, sitting between 40 and 50°c under load. 

One thing to note with the TUF PLUS, I removed the heatsinks to film the VRMs before using the board, and luckily I did as there was a fairly large metal shaving stuck in the thermal pad which was pretty close to shorting some pads there. I don’t expect this is a problem you’d see, but I’d be remiss to not mention it. 

So the VRMs are solid, but what’s up with that unique feature? Well, it’s a software tool called AI Mic. It’s meant to remove background noise using “a massive deep-learning database”. Lets test it out. 

It sounds fairly compressed, but no background noise is a decent trade off to make there. It doesn’t have a large performance impact which is nice too.

So besides software features, what else do you get? Well, on both the STRIX and the TUF you get 2.5Gb Ethernet, which is a surprise, that seems to be everywhere on this platform now, plus both boards have WiFi 6, again a nice to have too. You have the usual assortment of USB ports, audio using the now standard Realtek ALC1220, and some display outputs too, should you want to use a chip with integrated grap…oh wait, no CPU that’s currently available that’s supported on this board has that. Oh well, “future proofing” i guess!

BIOS wise, it’s pretty standard for Asus. Pretty easy to use, although not quite as user friendly as MSI’s one. Overclocking options, including memory timings, are plentiful, and was stable in my testing.

One thing to note on it’s PCIe Gen 4 support, much like it seems most B550 boards, even though bifurcation is now allowed, the second x16 slot is still actually connected via the chipset meaning you only get PCIe Gen 4 to the top x16 slot and top M.2 slot, the rest is all done via the gen 3 link to the chipset. It’s not a big deal, just something to note should you want to kit one of these out with multiple M.2s, SATA drives and actually use that 2.5G LAN, all at the same time. 

And finally, we have to come to the pricing. The STRIX F WiFi currently comes to £210, with the “budget” TUF PLUS board costing a whopping £185. That’s a lot, and while you do get a rather beefy VRM setup, Wifi 6 and 2.5G ethernet, I don’t know that it’s really worth the premium over it’s B450 counterpart unless you really care for a bit of PCIe Gen 4 support, and “guaranteed” bios updates for 4th gen chips.