Asus ROG Strix X370-I Gaming Review

Overclocking

4GHz is usually an easy target with our Ryzen 7 1700, and we plumbed in our usual vcore of 1.425V to see how far we could push things. 4GHz was perfectly stable, even in the torturous Terragen rendering test, so you'll be losing nothing here compared to the best ATX boards we've tested.

We pushed the frequency up to 4.05GHz where it again passed the test with flying colours - one of the best results we've seen. Sadly, 4.1GHz and 4.075GHz were out of reach at this voltage, but the board is clearly capable of more, especially if you can provide decent cooling to the VRMs or even water-cool them with one of the monoblocks that will likely appear from the likes of EKWB or Bitspower. You can check out or in-depth look at Asus' EFI and software here.

Performance Analysis

If you shy away from mini-ITX because you think it's inferior in terms of performance, then Asus has yet another example to dispel those fears. The ROG Strix X370-I Gaming matched all the other boards on test in terms of performance, and its slightly higher overclock allowed for some top spots in the graphs too such as the PCMark photo editing test, Cinebench, and Terragen 4, although as per usual there was very little difference at stock speed.

The M.2 heatsink might have helped the board claim the top spot in the storage results too, posting the quickest read and write speeds we've seen from an AM4 board. Audio performance was excellent too, sitting in the middle of the other Realtek ALC 1220-based boards. Power consumption was a tad high in some instances, but actually not that much more than the other AM4 mini-ITX board we've reviewed, and there were plenty of boards that posted higher numbers here.

Conclusion

It's great to see Ryzen getting some decent mini-ITX attention, and while there are other options out there that are a lot cheaper, this is the first board we've had hands on with that has enough cooling to deal with the demands of a 24/7 overclock without the constant worry the CPU power circuitry is melting. The heatsink gets pretty warm, but Asus has designed the board so both the VRM and M.2 heatsinks are as high as they can be to hopefully catch a little of your case's airflow.

It looks great and scores top marks in content creation, audio, and storage performance, overclocks like a trooper, and has an EFI and software suite that are up to Asus' usual standards. Like its Z370 sibling, there's not much by way of overclocking or testing tools here, though, and the fan control isn't quite as detailed as the efforts from MSI or Gigabyte at the moment, either in the EFI or software, and this is something we'd like to see Asus address. For your typical air- or water-cooled build, though, this is a stunning board for a mini Ryzen system and one that's happy to run with a hefty 24/7 overclock while lacking very little apart from some PCIe slots compared to larger AM4 boards.