A Closer Look
The TUF motherboards are a long-time favourite of mine, I like their industrial and practical design, but also appreciate that they have upgraded hardware that is designed to be more resilient and quite literally TUF “tough”.
It’s a performance-focused motherboard and comes with a potent 16+2+1 80A Power Stage design with large heatsinks to ensure it can deal with those more demanding CPUs, boost clocks and overclocking. The board is also fully equipped with the upgraded TUF 5K Black Metallic Capacitors, which have a much wider temperature tolerance and a 2.5x longer life span.
Below that, there’s the main M.2 slot, which supports PCIe 5.0 x4 on Ryzen 7000 and 9000, but Gen4 on 8000 processors.
however, the entire lower section of the motherboard is also armoured with huge heatsinks, ensuring that all additional M.2 mounts also get the best cooling performance. There’s a second Gen 5 M.2 below the main PCIe lane, and then two more Gen4 M.2 slots below that, with the larger heatsinks covering the middle two.
- 2 x M.2 2280 (PCIe 5.0 x4)
- 2 x M.2 2280 (PCIe 4.0 x4)
As you might expect, the primary PCIe slot is Gen5 and comes with the TUF armour, as well as Q-Release for easy removal of your expansion cards. There’s also a PCIe x16 @x4 at the bottom for an additional expansion card.
This motherboard features ALC1220P audio, with s 120 dB signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio for the stereo line out and a 113 dB SNR for the line in with impedance-sensing.
A nice bonus is the inclusion of two USB4 40Gbps Type-C ports on the rear I/O, as well as USB 10Gbps, 5Gbps, and a single USB 2.0 port, as well as the 2.5GbE LAN and WiFi 7 networking.
- 2 x USB4 (40Gbps) (2 x USB Type-C) ports
- 3 x USB 10Gbps ports (3 x Type-A)
- 4 x USB 5Gbps ports (4 x Type-A)
- 1 x USB 2.0 port (1 x Type-A)
- 1 x HDMI port
- 1 x Wi-Fi module
- 1 x Realtek 2.5Gb Ethernet port
- 5 x Audio jacks
- 1 x BIOS FlashBack button
