ASUS TUF GAMING B650M-E WIFI AMD B650 Ryzen Socket AM5 Micro-ATX Desktop Motherboard

Let's start with the good: This is a very good AM5 motherboard, it is able to provide enough power to the CPU to allow for good overclocking without the VRMs heating up above 60. The board also looks amazing in a M-ATX case, really achieving the 'look' I was going for with my build. In terms of expansion and slots, this board does not disappoint. It has everything you might need, unless you want to add more than 2 PCIE devices. Wifi 6 is also a very welcomed feature and the included antenna has some good range capabilities.

Now for the bad (and the reason I can't give it 5 stars): ASUS really likes its AI and I can't see why. When you set up this board I recommend turning off the AI auto performance enhancer in the advance tweaking tab. This netted me quite a noticeable performance boost and allowed for improved stability (more on this in a moment). Also the AI fan tweaking is just not good. It gives the fans a very steep step response, which results in audible fan ramping when the CPU heats up. Rather just manually override the curve and set it to a gradual increase. Then there's the stability, specifically with DDR5 RAM. I bought DDR5 6000 MHz RAM, which should be compatible with this board (and my CPU of course) but I really struggled to get the system stable at 6000 MHz. In the end I had to settle for 5600 MHz, and turning off the AI overclocking thing really helped me here. Now don't get me wrong, 5600 MHz is still very fast, and the difference between that and 6000 MHz is small. But it still feels like I'm leaving performance on the table which I payed for.

Hopefully a future BIOS update fixes the RAM stability, and ASUS does seem to be rolling them out frequently.