Asus TUF Gaming B860M-Plus WiFi review

Until now, anyone wanting to build a recent gaming PC with an Intel Core Ultra 200S processor had to choose the Z890 motherboard, and the cheapest one cost just under $300. The recent Intel B860 motherboard chipset, aimed at the mainstream market, aims to solve this problem by offering fewer features but at a lower price. The Asus TUF Gaming B860M-Plus WiFi costs around $210, so is it worth considering?

To answer this question, we first need to understand what the fundamental differences are between these two chipsets, so let’s break them down into what each is capable of handling.

Even a cursory look at this table shows that the B860 is a significantly less capable chipset compared to the Z890, but it’s really no different than previous generations. Considering AMD allows CPU overclocking with the B850 chipset (and yes, all the names are too similar), the fact that Intel still insists on memory-only overclocking with the B860 is very anachronistic.

While the B860 chipset doesn’t support USB4, there’s nothing stopping a motherboard vendor from adding the feature to a mid-range model. However, to achieve this, four PCIe lanes would be required out of the 14 supported for 40 Gbps, so it is unlikely that many, if any, B860 motherboards will feature USB4.

In the case of the Asus TUF Gaming B860M-Plus WiFi card, eight of the 14 PCIe 4.0 lanes are used for two of the M.2 slots (the main M.2 slot is the PCIe 5.0 CPU connection), which leaves only six lanes for everything else. Four of them take up a vacant PCIe x4 slot at the bottom of the motherboard, so Asus didn’t have much opportunity to add more.

However, this and most other B860 motherboards have a Wi-Fi 7 module, and after testing several recent boards (all with the aforementioned wireless system), I can honestly say that this is a feature worth having.

You don’t even need a Wi-Fi 7 router to take advantage of the better system – I exploit a Wi-Fi 6 router, and the wireless signal and transmission speeds are much better on Wi-Fi 7 compared to the older ones.

Other nice touches include the quick release lever for the graphics card slot – no more fussing with trying to unlock the card, just press the plastic strip above the chipset heatsink and you can easily pull the card out.

The latest BIOS is in 1080p, which makes it much nicer to read, and the Q-Dashboard option, which gives you an overview of your motherboard slots and sockets, is a great way to see at a glance what’s connected correctly.

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It’s safe and sound to say that the October 2023 launch of Arrow Lake did not go according to Intel’s plan, and the performance of the Core Ultra 200S series processors exceeded expectations in every respect. Since then, both Windows 11 and Z890 motherboards have received numerous updates to improve thread scheduling, power profiles, and memory latency.

This makes it a little arduous to fully evaluate the performance of this Asus TUF Gaming B860M-Plus WiFi, as it was released with all of these updates, while the previous Z890 benchmark results are all preliminary fixes.

We do, however, have results for the Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice, and considering its retail price of $270, it’s a useful inclusion in the benchmarks below. At least you will be able to see what the current state of Lake Arrow is and how far it has come.

Benchmarks and performance

Testbed for PC gamers
Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K | Cooler: MSI MAG Coreliquid I360 | ARIES: 332 GB Lexar Thor OC DDR5-6000 | Storage: 2TB Corsair MP700 | Charger: Corsair RM850x Shift 850 W | Operating system: Windows 11 24H2 | Chassis: Open platform | Monitor: Acer XB280HK

The first benchmark I ran was our Factorio test. During my first tests of Intel Core Ultra 200S processors, I found that this is a very good indicator of whether the BIOS is decent or not. As it turns out, the one the TUF Gaming B860M-Plus WiFi came with wasn’t one, so the first thing I did was update the BIOS to version 0805 – it’s a beta version, but it supports all the latest Intel performance patches for Arrow Lake.

Well, it wasn’t quite first thing I did. When installing Windows 11, I had to install drivers for the Wi-Fi module. However, this can be bypassed if you don’t have a LAN connection (press Shift+F10 when you get to the part where the installation is looking for a network, then type oobebypassnro to restart your computer and be able to set up a local account). I prefer to just like go to online setup as soon as possible to get all relevant updates.

Except I couldn’t, because they exist Three The Wi-Fi drivers are located on the support page for this motherboard (Realtek, MediaTek and an unbranded driver) and the box/manual does not say which module is installed on the board. After trying all the options several times and manually installing a whole bunch of other drivers, I finally managed to get MediaTek working.

In any case, we can see that Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3 and our Factorio test perform at a level that puts the performance of the Asus B860M-Plus roughly halfway between the average state of Z890 motherboards in October 2023 (in the case of the Arrow Lake launch and marked asterisk) and the recently tested Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice.

It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. Theoretically, the B860 chipset shouldn’t have any impact on the CPU’s gaming performance since it only supports USB ports, M.2 slots, and the like. So the discrepancies you see will depend on how Asus designed the rest of the motherboard and how it configured the BIOS.

If productivity and content creation are more essential to you than gaming, that’s good news in that regard. In our standard CPU benchmarks, such as Cinebench 2024, Blender 4.2, and 7zip, the Asus TUF Gaming B860M-Plus WiFi performs significantly better than the Gigabyte Z890 – the noticeable differences are within the test variance.

The problem with the Asus B860M-Plus is heat. The motherboard doesn’t have any thermal sensor for the VRMs, so it wasn’t possible to measure exactly how warm they get during weighty CPU load. I used my fingertip to gauge how warm the heatsinks were, but it’s strenuous to add “Hmm, a little too hot” to the graph.

Next is the main heat sink for the SSD. It’s a slim piece of lightweight metal with a fairly negligible thermal pad underneath, so I didn’t expect it to handle a PCIe 5.0 SSD during weighty exploit. Suffice it to say, my expectations were fully met as the drive repeatedly exceeded its thermal limit, limiting write performance.

Considering that one of the motherboard’s key selling points is the Gen5 SSD slot, the fact that it can’t really handle such a drive is rather disappointing, although, to be fair, relative to Asus, relatively few affordable motherboards can handle it.

At least the chipset itself ran smoothly throughout, and I even experimented with charging it with a different SSD and various USB devices to put the most stress on the little chip. At no point did its temperature exceed 40°C, and a quick finger test of the heatsink showed that this was not a reading error.

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Considering all this, it’s strenuous to recommend the Asus TUF Gaming B860M-Plus WiFi motherboard. It’s not a bad product, and at $210 it’s much cheaper than many other Arrow Lake boards. However, if you’re willing to spend a little more, you can choose from better microATX options.

For example, Asus’ own WiFi Sports Prime Z890M-Plus four PCIe slots and six SATA ports, and it’s only $27 more exorbitant. The ASRock Z780M only has a Wi-Fi 6E module and a single PCIe slot, but in addition to the eight rear USB ports, there are two full-speed Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports.

However, it costs $260, but for $20 less you can buy the Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite Ice with ten USB ports on the rear IO panel, and one of them is USB4.

And only if have to you have a microATX motherboard. If your PC case has room for a full-size motherboard, you’re definitely better off choosing one of these, the Z890 or B860, as there will be more room for PCIe slots and other features.

Apart from its relatively low price, the TUF Gaming B860M-Plus doesn’t have much else to offer, and in today’s motherboard market, just being low-cost isn’t enough.