Overclocking

We had no problems dealing with the excellent Asus EFI that has the ability to apply a manual absolute voltage or fiddle with offsets, and applying our usual 1.425V saw us achieve 4.25GHz across all cores with our Ryzen 7 2700X with no other tweaking necessary.

There were no hints of throttling during our 10-minute stress test either, but we haven't had many issues here recently other than with B450 boards. You can check out our overview of Asus' latest EFIs and software here.

Performance Analysis

There were no hiccups in the performance testing and as usual, results varied little across the X470 boards we've reviewed so far. The audio performance was among the best we've seen, with the dynamic range of 113dBA beating the rest of the field, although it dipped a bit on the noise level. Realistically, you wouldn't be able to distinguish between these results anyway. The SATA 6Gbps and M.2 speeds were on the money with read and write speeds of 3,400MB/s and 1875MB/s respectively using our Samsung 960 Evo, and the M.2 heatsink saw the peak load temperature during our looped CrystalDiskMark test of the SSD fall from 76°C to 62°C.

As usual, the overclock saw benefits in most tests, but Ashes of the Singularity can often be a little slower due to the overclock reaching a lower frequency than AMD's new boosting algorithms, but you're only minus a single frame per second. The overclock saw a three-second drop in the HandBrake encoding time and nearly 100 points added to the Cinebench score too. We did see some fairly high power consumption figures, though, with the overclocked idle and load draw being the highest on test by quite a margin at 79W and 360W, although we didn't see any side-effects of this other than the potential for a fractionally higher electricity bill.

Conclusion

The Asus ROG Strix X470-I Gaming is good-looking and loaded with features and is an ideal home for AMD's eight-core Ryzen CPUs if you want to build a mini system. There are some fantastic mini-ITX cases out there right now, and whether you're building a portable LAN gaming rig or your heavily overclocked daily driver, you'll be losing little except a couple of PCIe slots and fan headers compared to its larger siblings. It's top marks from us, then, in terms of performance and features, but the issue of the nearly identical ROG Strix B450-I Gaming rears its head again, as it offers everything this board does but leaves you with an extra £15 in your back pocket. As a result, seeing as both boards are widely available, unless you must have the top-dog chipset, we'd probably opt for the B450 board.