Motherboards

The ASRock X870 Riptide WiFi board is what we've chosen in our latest Extreme Gaming build and it does the job well. We chose it for a variety of reasons, including the color profile matching the general idea we were going for, the support for everything we wanted to put into this build, and it doesn't hurt that the name was also right in theme with Bore Tide. 

To start with, the unboxing was interesting. There was no seals or tape of any kind. Simply a cardboard tongue tucked into a cardboard pocket. This is unusual these days, especially on a motherboard of this price point. It's got an extra box floating on top of the motherboard itself with the wifi antenna and an ARGB 3-to-1 splitter included inside. The WiFi 7 Antenna is nice, with a sturdy cable that doesn't appear to be at risk of damage, and an adhesive base. Minor gripe that the base is not magnetic; while you will be able to put it wherever you like, it won't be able to be moved freely if desired/needed without peeling back the adhesive. We can't say quite how reusable this adhesive is, testing adhesive over time and in various environments is definitely outside of our skillset, but it's certainly not as reusable as a magnet. The motherboard underneath is in a standard anti-static box. Underneath is the standard sata cables, a bare-minimum amount of paperwork, a pretty nice metal PG (Phantom Gaming) badge, and a thermistor. The thermistor is a nice touch; it allows you to monitor temperature of any chosen spot in the case or on the motherboard, and you can even set your fan curve(s) based on it. Still, it's a feature that 99% of people will never use. Would very much rather that bit of the budget go towards a paper manual included within the box or magnets in the WiFi stand.

Moving on to the motherboard itself, it looks really nice, and the heatsinks and other attachments are very sturdy. No flimsily-mounted solutions here! It's got one Gen 5 M.2 socket and two Gen 4 M.2 sockets, so it supports the current fastest drives and even secondary drives are at the second highest standard. The Gen 5 socket is also completely tool-less, which is nice. It also has four SATA 3 ports, for those with higher storage requirements. It has two PCIe x16 sockets (one Gen 5, where you should put your GPU, and one Gen 4). As always with these considerations, we're limited on channels. On this board, the second PCIe slot shares bandwidth with the third M.2 socket, so you can have an extra PCIe card or an extra-extra M.2 drive, but not both at once. Limited channels is a limitation of the platform itself, some concession must be made somewhere and that can't really be improved, but it's worth noting for someone who wants extra PCIe cards. Still, with the price this goes for one would hope for at least one PCIe x1 slot towards the bottom to plug a sound card into if needed, but we don't get that.

For other ports, we've got two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A and two USB 2.0 ports as well as a single USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, to support up to 8 front USB Type-A and one USB Type-C. More realistically you'll get up to 4 USB Type-A and use the others for peripherals such as a hub or AIO controller. Standard Front Audio connectors supports stereo and microphone, and standard Front Panel supports power and reset buttons as well as HDD and Power LEDs, and a diagnostic speaker if desired. Rear IO features nine USB Type-A ranging from 2.0 to 3.2 Gen2, and there are two rear USB4 Type-C. A single HDMI port supports G series chips, 2.5G Ethernet would be the preferred connectivity option, but the WiFi 7 antenna connectors feature the standard screw-in design, and a BIOS flashback button lets you update your bios even without a CPU. Finally, we've got digital audio, microphone, and stereo speaker connectors on the rear for audio support.

This motherboard also has 6 fan headers total, including AIO Pump header, which is adequate, though these are spread out as two on bottom, three on top, and one on the inside left edge. Would like to see at least one on the right side for better cable management options. RGB is a very good note, where not only the motherboard has a pretty bright and responsive built-in RGB strip on the bottom, but support is healthy with 3 total 5050 ARGB headers on the motherboard. There's also one non-ARGB 5050 header for legacy support, though those are rare to see these days. Interestingly, there's one more header that looks exactly like a 5050 ARGB header on the bottom, labelled "UART1". It is not clear what this is for and it's not even acknowledged in the manual at all, so not sure what it does. Google results are inconsistent and inconclusive, with various reports of what it might do but no verifiable data.

After all of that is said and done, it supports everything we need, but on a X-series chipset and especially at the price point of this board, some extra quality-of-life features such as QCode LEDs or GPU quick-release, rear-mounted Clear CMOS button or internal Start/Reset buttons would be nice to have. Some or all of these features are pretty much standard on most motherboards at this price but missing here. 

Once the system is built, we can get into BIOS. If you're seen many others to compare, the most striking thing about this BIOS is that is just feels... old. This BIOS feels like it's straight out of 2010, with newer features but no UI or GUI improvements. It is slow, unresponsive (sometimes multiple clicks are needed until the BIOS registers you've selected an option), and generally clunky. Options such as overclocking controls are plentiful and have good ranges, but everything is shorthand as if they're trying to fit all of this onto a 640p sized screen and most of the options do not have descriptors, making newer users need to google answers on what settings are supposed to do what. To be fair, there are a great many options, more than some competitors, and they are organized very well, so if you are familiar with this type of system and know what you're doing you can find what you're looking for reliably, but it is not welcoming to a new user or someone trying to learn a new hobby or skill. Beyond those things, though, it also is missing many features that are seen in the competition. The Fan Curve customizer is clunky and missing many options that would be nice to have, the boot menu doesn't seem to let you set boot priorities in very many ways, hardware monitor is very lacking in details, and more. 

On a couple of positive notes, the system has a native RGB controller with a number of presets and customizable support. This specifically is better than any of the competition I've seen. While a BIOS controller lacks the drivers or other support to control things such as your RAM or GPU lights, anything that is plugged into one of the various headers, as well as the integrated RGB, is controlled here natively and it's done so better on this board than any other we've used. Additionally, the BIOS updater is great. ASRock nailed it, with just one click the system will automatically scan your flash drive and detect which BIOS update is compatible (if any). One more click and the update starts. A minimum of muss and fuss, no worries about if you're navigating the menus to find the correct file amongst the various things unpacked from the .zip folder. Just an automatic scan-and-verify system that we've seen on other ASRock boards before, and it is always appreciated.

In EZ Mode, the most commonly accessed functions are readily available, such as EXPO, boot options, fan curves, and more. Two important-to-note things here are found at the top-right of this screen: "TDP to 105W" and "Game Mode". For the first one, check the TDP of your chip and the officially supported limits posted by AMD. Recently, AMD has officially extended their warranties to the power limit of some chips up to 105W. So if you have a 65W chip like the Ryzen 7 9700X you can get a quick and easy overclock with just one button without risking your warranty or diving into more complicated overclocking functions. However, if you have a 120W chip like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, you will actually be throttling your chip. This is not clarified in BIOS so be sure to check your chip's TDP and if it's supported up to 105W before toggling this feature.

Finally, our biggest complaint with this motherboard: "Gaming Mode". We can't tell you exactly how or why, but "Gaming Mode" is anything but. We tested three times just to confirm and the results are pretty consistent. DO NOT TURN ON "GAMING MODE". Put a star by it. Highlight it. Cut it out and pin it on your wall. Do not turn "Gaming Mode" on. What does it do? That's a good question. From our testing, it disables hyperthreading (does your CPU have 6 cores and 12 threads? No, it doesn't! Now you just have 6 threads on those 6 cores! Isn't that great!?). It also lowers the boost clock limit of your CPU, gives you worse timings/speed on your RAM EXPO profile, and... well, we weren't able to determine exactly what it did to the GPU, but GPU performance also went down. Perhaps it should be called anti-gaming mode. For reference, with "Gaming Mode" turned off, our score on our benchmark was 14,510. With "Gaming Mode" turned on and literally all other settings exactly the same, we scored 10,947 points on our benchmark. We use Performance Test v11, by PassMark, which tests CPU, GPU, RAM, and SSD all concurrently. In this test, CPU, GPU, and RAM all scored significantly lower with "Gaming Mode" turned on rather than turned off. Not sure why, but it always, in our testing, significantly decreases the performance of your entire computer (just about). We genuinely debated downgrading this review all the way to three stars just because of how much time and energy this wasted figuring out why we weren't getting our proper performance and then all the testing and verification needed to be sure it was this option. That's how much of an issue this is. But in the end, it's just one bad option, and it's solved by simply toggling one selection. It wouldn't have been a big deal if it was known how terrible this option is ahead of time, but that's what reviews are for. 

As a final note, this motherboard packs no bloatware. That should be the standard, but unfortunately these days it is not. Many boards these days, during a first sign-in to your operating system, promote to you their software package and want you to download and install it and give them permission to collect and sell your data and put garbage programs like McAfee or Norton on your system. It's sad that we've reached a point in time where "no bloatware" is a rare positive instead of the standard way of doing things, but here we are.

This motherboard has an MSRP of $280. For that price tag, we would very much like to see some more quality of life features, both regarding hardware in the box and firmware in the BIOS. Still, it has some very good positives going for it, supports a large variety of use-cases, has support for the latest Gen5 devices and WiFi7 connections, and it looks very nice as well. You could definitely go worse than this board. We would definitely recommend this board to an experienced builder, but might be a bit more hesitant with that recommendation for a first timer. This board often goes on sale for $260 or so, so we would definitely recommend waiting for a deal if you're in no hurry, but it's not a bad choice at the MSRP. If you're interested in this motherboard, you can read all about the more technical specs or order your own on Amazon here.