The Aorus Master price doesn't make much sense at this time. The Taichi is a decent board but isn't spectacular at anything, though it does offer USB 4 support out of the box, which might be beneficial to you. That leaves Asus' E Gaming, which we think is the best high-end option here. Orange Line = top recommendation among its key competitors (form factor, price segment, features, etc.). And as you can imagine, the higher-end ones with above 190W of TDP all gave this board a hard time.

One noticeable difference between the MSI Pro B650-P WiFi and the X670-P model is that its main heatsink doesn’t extend all the way down to the M.2 slot. Instead, it stops short a few inches above it. You can see the comparison below. Due to chipset and price limitations, this board doesn’t have a very large number of SSD slots. Having said that, it definitely has a sufficient amount for casual users. Wi-Fi 6E 6GHz may depend on every country’s regulations and will be ready in Windows 10 build 21H1 and Windows 11. Either way, if you have a decent airflow in your case, I wouldn’t use my M.2 in this first slot. Both slots have PCIe 4.0 support, so you won’t be losing performance by doing so. And using the secondary slot will make it easier if you want to take the SSD off in the future.

Overview

Then, we have the Asus Prime series, which includes the Prime B650M-A WiFi, Prime B650-Plus, and Prime B650M-A WiFi II. Unfortunately, we must recommend avoiding these. Like the ultra-affordable Gigabyte B650M K, the Asus Prime boards all use discrete MOSFETs, resulting in poor VRM thermals. Speaking of futureproof, if you plan on making use of a PCIe 5.0 graphics card and NVME slots, 50 dollars more for the Msi Pr o X670-P Wifi doesn’t look like a bad deal in the long run. Memory

Adding to the list of downsides of this low-end chipset, we have the low memory OC threshold. Surprisingly, it’s not as much of a problem as it might seem, as it can still reach speeds of up to 6400MHz.

Q & A

Here are all the VRM temperature results, and it won't surprise anyone to learn that the Aorus Master and Taichi are the two best performing boards here, though there are several Aorus Pro and Elite models with similar temps in the low 50s. M.2 Shield FROZR: Strengthened built-in M.2 thermal solution. Keeps M.2 SSDs safe while preventing throttling, making them run faster.