Introduction
In July of 2024, AMD announced the X870/E chipset, together with the B850 chipset. In early January 2025, we began to see the discharge announcements of motherboards based on this B850 chipset, which supports socket AM5 CPUs. This review will evaluate the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi motherboard.
This evaluation represents our second within the B850 chipset series from ASRock. Phantom Gaming is a distinctly themed motherboard series from ASRock, and it is usually their gaming-focused tier of boards. This board has the familiar all black theme with a swirled “RIPTIDE” wave pattern and purple-red color splashed (no pun intended) accents on the I/O and chipset heatsinks.
ASRock is coming to this release loaded to the hilt with motherboard selections. There are at least 16 different B850 motherboards to select from in all sizes and styles. Actually, one-half of the B850 offerings from ASRock are either mATX or ITX. Our ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi is certainly one of seven full ATX boards and has loads of connectivity and storage, in addition to full options inside the UEFI/BIOS for overclocking the CPU and memory. Also, the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi pushes all the necessities buttons, including Gen5 PCIe and Gen5 M.2 support. About all that’s missing on this board is USB4, which is an optional offering on the B850 motherboards.
In simplified terms, the AMD B850 has a single promontory chipset and supports PCIe 5.0 (Gen5) to the NVMe with graphics support of PCIe 5.0 being an optional feature, otherwise, it supports PCIe 4.0 (Gen4) graphics. It also supports as much as USB 3.2 20Gbps natively and lacks the USB4 mandatory spec of the AMD X870/E chipsets. Motherboards based on this class of chipset still support CPU and memory overclocking, nonetheless, for full enthusiast tweaking options. AMD has an amazing chipset comparison chart available for reference.
With the discharge of the B850 chipset motherboards comes the plan to permit entry or upgrade to socket AM5 at an inexpensive price without sacrificing form or (much) function. Our ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi is priced currently at $219. We’ll dig in and see if $219 should buy a high quality gaming platform.
Packaging and Contents
This motherboard was received directly from ASRock. That is the complete retail box style that we now have seen in all our reviews to this point. The board is placed in an antistatic bag and cushioned by cardboard inserts. It is a pretty spartan package. Included are: wifi antenna, “Quick Start guide”, case badge, two SATA cables, a thermistor, and an RGB extension cable.
ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi Features
The ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi is a full ATX motherboard. As we discussed earlier, Phantom Gaming could be very consistently carried across ASRock motherboards. The theme is all black swirls and subtle red-purple color accents. It’s a reasonably good-looking board. The heatsinks are likewise heavy brushed aluminum with red, purple, and black decals and lettering. The heatsinks are solid aluminum, which provides the board a solid feel.
The PCB is eight-layer copper inlayed, so there isn’t a flex or bend to the board in any respect. There may be RGB on this board along the underside of the secondary M.2 heatsink, in addition to at least 4 RGB headers for more in the event you need it. No digital readouts or an influence button on this motherboard, but ASRock does use a set of De-Bug LEDs in the fitting upper corner for some guidance in the event you do run into a problem.
There are 4 M.2 slots on this board. The first M.2 slot heatsink has an EZ release mechanism. The secondary M.2 heatsink, housing M.2#3 and #4 needs a screwdriver to remove, the screws are secured to the heatsink to maintain them put. The M.2_2 slot has no heatsink. All of the M.2 slots have tool-less hold-down mechanisms consisting of a small rotating latch. The M.2 heatsinks have top-mounted thermal pads.
The first M.2 slot has a bottom-mounted thermal pad as well. The first PCIe slot has a “Graphics Card Lite” latch situated alongside the rear release. It is actually an enlarged tab that sits on the latch for individuals with fumble fingers, making it easier to release your GPU. It’s a pleasant touch and works quite well. One push will keep the GPU latch open so you may easily remove the GPU in a single motion. The first PCIe can also be metal-reinforced.
The rear I/O panel of the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi has a reasonably well-equipped set of connections. There are nine USB-A ports (three 5Gb/s and two 10Gb/s) and two USB-C ports (10Gb/s) alongside WiFi 7 and a pair of.5 Gb ethernet. The wireless is a MediaTek RZ717, and the LAN is Intel Killer E3100G. Audio can support as much as 7.1 channels via a RealTek ALC 4082 codec. The audio also supports Nahimic Audio from Steel Series. Recall that B850 chipsets don’t require USB4 support, so truthfully, that’s all that’s lacking on the I/O side of things.
Power Delivery
This motherboard uses a 14+2+1 Smart Power Phase setup with 80amps Dr.MOS across the VCore. This needs to be greater than adequate power and protection for CPU overclocking. The twin 8-pin CPU power connectors are placed in the usual location on this Phantom Gaming board, the highest left. As was stated above, the VRM heatsinks are heavy brushed aluminum. We didn’t discover any heatpipes. The PCB is advertised by ASRock as an eight-layer server-grade board with 2oz copper layering. ASRock also utilizes black 20K capacitors for what they feel is higher quality and longevity.
CPU Socket, Memory, and Storage
The ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi supports socket AM5 CPUs within the Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 series. There may be ample space surrounding the socket to put most, if not all, CPU coolers. Our MSI AIO MAG Core 360I gave us no mounting issues. Memory supported includes DDR5 DIMMs as much as 256 GB in total. Frequencies are advertised as much as 8000MT/s (OC). XMP and Expo profiles are supported for 1-click overclocking. The memory slots are double-latched. The spacing seems adequate for giant CPU coolers. The one issue here could also be tall DIMM heatsinks in slot A1 and low cooling fins on an air-cooled heatsink.
There may be actually quite a little bit of storage on this motherboard. Slot M.2_1 supports Gen5 SSDs (Blazing M.2), and slots 2 through 4 support full-speed Gen4 SSDs (Hyper M.2). Together with this are 4 SATA 6 Gb/s right-angled ports on the right-hand side of the motherboard powered by an ASM 1064 chip. M.2#1 and #2 are from the CPU, while M.2#3 and #4 are from the B850 chipset. Transfer rates are 128Gb/s Gen5 and 64Gb/s Gen4. Of note, if M.2_4 slot is occupied, PCIe slot 2 will likely be disabled.
Expansion
Expansion on this motherboard consists of 1 primary Gen5x16 PCIe slot and one PCIe Gen4x4 slot. The first slot is supplied by the CPU, the opposite by the chipset. The first slot is metal-reinforced and has a really nifty “Graphics Card Lite” Release latch situated on the right-hand edge (pen pointer added for emphasis in photo). It isn’t quite an EZ release button or lever, and you continue to need to get your finger near the back end of your GPU, nevertheless it is kind of helpful, nonetheless. Again, in the event you populate M.2_4 you’ll disable PCIe slot#2.
The interesting point about this layout for expansion and storage is spacing. Even with a big 3 slot GPU, ASRock has placed the M.2 slots well out of the way in which. If you will have a thin-ish Gen4 SSD, you will certainly find a way to utilize slot#2, which has been difficult on most of the other X870/E motherboards. Plus it is not any loss that M.2 slot #2 doesn’t have a heatsink cover since you generally can’t use it resulting from fitment under the GPU.
I/O
The rear I/O panel is well supplied on the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi motherboard. The panel has the motherboard plate embedded, which is good. Working from left to right: HDMI port, WiFi antenna, BIOS Flashback botton, 4 USB-A 2.0 ports, two USB-A Gen3.2 (10Gb/s “Ultra Power”), two USB-A 3.1 (5Gb/s “Lightning Gaming”), one USB-C (10Gb/s), 2.5Gb RJ-45 ethernet, USB-A Gen3.1 (5Gb/s) port, USB-C (10Gb/s) port and SPDIF and sound outputs. You’ll notice that there are two ports labelled “ULTRA USB POWER” and two ports labelled “LIGHTNING GAMING”. These are dedicated ports by ASRock, seen of their gaming theme motherboards. One set can provide extra charging watts while the opposite has lower latency for mice or keyboards. Ultra Power is 10Gb/s while Lightning Gaming are 5Gb/s.
On the foremost board, we now have a complete of six 4-pin fan headers. Three on the highest right, one labeled AIO, two on the underside two, and one tucked just behind the I/O panel. The “Unbelievable” software within the BIOS can control all these with one click or individually. On the fitting fringe of the board, we now have a single USB type C front panel header (20Gb/s), one right-angled and one flat USB Gen 3.1 headers (5Gb/s), and 4 right-angled SATA ports. The underside edge houses the front panel header, two USB 2.0 headers, and the front audio header. This board has a complete of 4 LED headers; three are addressable, and one is a 12V four-pin header. This could possibly be a pleasant compliment to the row of RGBs already on the board. For those who need it, ASRock Polychrome SYNC is out there as a download.
UEFI/BIOS
The ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi uses a normal UEFI/BIOS, an American Megatrend AMI UEFI. Entering the BIOS is kind of easy from the emblem screen on boot. The BIOS enters the foremost screen for “Advanced mode” by default. There are “Advanced” and “Easy” modes to select from. The Easy Mode is a single screen that provides basic information in addition to the choices to pick out RAM overclocking profiles, enable PBO, and Boot priority. Boot priority is solely a drag and drop, which is good and straightforward to make use of. Hitting F6 will take you to Advanced Mode, which is where OC Tweaker and Advanced submenus reside, in addition to the Tool menu and Hardware Monitoring/Unbelievable menus.
Recall that the B850 motherboards have each manual and automatic overclocking settings for the CPU and RAM. This enables for quite a little bit of tinkering if that’s what you enjoy. Quite truthfully, in the event you take a look at the X870 Phantom Gaming RIPTIDE WiFi motherboard review, you’ll find that the BIOS for the B850 Phantom Gaming RIPTIDE is actually an identical.
Our ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi got here to us with BIOS version 3.15.AS02, dated 12 Dec 24. The newest BIOS is listed on the ASRock support as 3.18.AS02 dated 17 FEB 25. We updated the BIOS to this version using the “Quick Flash” software within the Tools section of the BIOS. Quick Flash could be very easy to make use of. Once the BIOS version is unzipped on a flash drive, all we needed to do was enable the tool and it situated the BIOS version mechanically. Once enabled, the tool did all of the work. ASRock also has “BIOS Flashback,” wherein all you would like is a PSU and the BIOS version. The button is situated on the rear I/O panel.
We found working inside the UEFI was well organized. Navigation was very straightforward. The foremost sections were all well labeled, and the submenus were categorized to be easy to seek out. The layout was very smooth to navigate, and selections could mostly be made with a single mouse click. You’ll notice that we now have fewer gallery screenshots of the BIOS on this review. That is resulting from the incontrovertible fact that this BIOS is actually an identical to the recently reviewed ASRock B850 Steel Legend WiFi. You might be welcome to review that gallery as well.
Subsystem and CPU Testing
Testing the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi was achieved using the benchmarks below. The next components were used: Ryzen 7 7700X, Corsair Vengence DDR5 32GB at 6000MT/s (CMH32G5M2D6000C36), MSI Spatium M580 Gen5 NVME, and ASRock Radeon 7600XT Steel Legend 16GB graphics card. Comparison results are discussed from the recent review of the ASRock Phantom Gaming X870 RIPTIDE WiFi motherboard and ASRock B850 Steel Legend WiFi motherboard.
Benchmark Results
In all of the benchmarks noted within the gallery, the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi registered results on par with the ASRock B850 Steel Legend and either the identical or very near the ASRock X870 RIPTIDE. The board handled the temperatures of 20 minutes of Cinebench R23 thoroughly, as you may see in the ultimate slide.
Conclusion
This review allowed us to judge our second brand-new ASRock B850 chipset motherboard, the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi. This full sized ATX board has an almost an identical layout as its counterpart, the X870 chipset Phantom Gaming RIPTIDE WiFi. Actually, our board has more on-board storage than the X870 chipset. As well as, the B850 Phantom Gaming RIPTIDE WiFi supports socket AM5 CPUs, DDR5 DIMMs as much as 8000M/T, and Gen5 PCIe and SSDs. About all you trade off for a lower cost tag is USB4 support.
Installation and Use
This ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi gave us no issues from construct as well. Every part installed because it should, and there was adequate spacing to achieve this. Overall, the board layout could be very well thought out. The board is solidly built. On top of the standard, we liked the EZ Release primary M.2 heatsink and the brand new “GPU Lite Latch.” The one place you would like a tool is to remove the secondary M.2 heatsink. The M.2 spacings are well thought out for using large GPUs. Did we mention there are 4 M.2 slots? Well, one Gen5 and three full Gen4, very nice, and another than on the X870 motherboards. You don’t get any USB4, but you do have more USB ports than you would like; that’s a fact. Overall, side by side, you just can’t tell much difference between the B850 and the X870 Phantom Gaming RIPTIDE motherboards, and that’s kind of fantastic given the value point.
The primary boot-up was no issue. The UEFI/BIOS is actually the identical because the X870 version. Navigation was easy, and the menus made sense. You’ve got full automatic and manual overclocking ability for the CPU and memory. Quick Flash worked with out a hitch, and it is vitally easy to make use of. Windows 11 installed quickly and simply, with no issues. Every benchmark ran with out a problem, and the outcomes were essentially the identical as our X870 chipset motherboards featuring the identical an identical components. Cooling was no issue. Using a 30-minute run-through of Cinebench R23, the board ran flawlessly. There have been simply no hiccups or problems from start to complete.
Final Points
We said in our most up-to-date review that the ASRock B850 Steel Legend was a Deja-Vu experience in comparison with the X870 Steel Legend. Well, it’s Deja-Vu all once again here as well. The ASRock Phantom Gaming B850 RIPTIDE WiFi is a distinctly designed and themed gaming motherboard. For those who occur to just like the all black look of the RIPTIDE, it should be a tough selection to select the B850 or the X870. There may be little physical difference and two missing USB4 ports. This B850 board performed flawlessly and achieved nearly an identical benchmark scores as its X870 version, using the identical an identical components. For those who are on a budget and wish a good-looking well well-constructed board, this could be place to save lots of $60 without losing much, if anything.
