++++ The ASRock B850 Rock WiFi 7 is exactly what ASRock promised, a rock-solid motherboard without a lot of bells and whistles. Sure, the board could use a few extra convenience features, but that wouldn’t improve its performance in practice. With the B850 Rock board, ASRock has delivered exactly what many have long wanted for the AM5 socket. It offers all the features AMD intended for a B850 board, plus PCIe 5.0 for the graphics card on top of that. However, the listed price of around 190 Euro wasn’t quite where it should have been at first. That’s because, at the time of testing, the excellently equipped ASRock B850 Steel Legend from our previous test, which significantly outperforms the B850 Rock WiFi 7 in many respects. A few days later, however, the price has already improved significantly to around 160-170 Euro.
With Wi-Fi 7 and 2.5 Gb/s LAN, the new Rock Board offers fast networking capabilities, and the number of USB ports is also impressive. Unfortunately, the front USB ports are limited to a maximum of 5 Gb/s, and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 with 20 Gb/s is nowhere to be found. A USB fast-charging feature is also missing. However, with two speedy M.2 slots (1x Gen5, 1x Gen4) and 4 SATA ports, it holds its own in the most important areas.
While the audio section, powered by the Realtek ALC897, is somewhat limited, it should still be sufficient for many applications that don’t require top-tier performance.
If the price drops a bit further a few weeks after release, the ASRock B850 Rock WiFi 7 is definitely worth recommending for budget-conscious users, as it has no real weaknesses and offers solid quality.
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* The AMD AM5 motherboard review is based on an AMD Ryzen 5 7500F processor, 2x 32GB DDR5-6400 memory modules, a Seasonic 1300W power supply, and the following software configuration: Microsoft Windows 11 and Futuremark PCMark10 (available as a download in the Links and Downloads section). All benchmark results are intended solely as a comparison of approximate motherboard performance.
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