Being mostly identical to the original ASUS ROG Strix B850-I Gaming Wi-Fi aside from minor tweaks such as doubling the BIOS size—besides of course the white theme—the ROG Strix B850-I Gaming Wi-Fi7 W offers a similar solid base. This includes the features, specifications and performance expected of a B850 Mini-ITX motherboard, with Wi-Fi 7, decent audio, PCIe Gen 5 SSD and GPU support, an excellent EFI, and useful software all included. It's also good to see ASUS adding a white option here too, for any of its die-hard fans to take advantage of rather than opt for the competition's motherboards.

This B850 offering manages to have a few things X870 Mini-ITX motherboards lack, such as dual PCIe Gen 5 M.2 ports, actively-cooled VRMs, and only it and its X870 sibling offer a combination of an excellent EFI and software, too. ASRock and Gigabyte score fewer points there and while MSI's EFI is generally on par, its software feels far less polished. However, the like-for-like comparisons are tricky here thanks to one major issue with the ROG Strix B850-I Gaming Wi-Fi7 W. Its price.

The original version of the board saw a significant price hike a while ago, and while it came highly recommended in our original review 14 months ago and for a while after, the fact you'll struggle to find it for less than $300 means it's difficult to recommend, especially when the likes of the excellent MSI MPG B850I Edge Ti Wi-Fi cost noticeably less. With the board we're looking at today retailing for close to $400, this means it's now level with the MSI MPG X870I Edge TI EVO Wi-Fi, which is better in nearly every way with a faster and more powerful USB Type-C header, more M.2 ports and triple monitor support to name a few. In fact, even the ROG Strix X870-I Gaming Wi-Fi is only $20 more.

It's clear, then, that availability—which for the moment seems to lack decent options for Europe and the US—isn't the board's only issue, as the hefty white color premium seems to mean it won't find its way onto many shortlists in the first place. We can only hope to find it at a more reasonable price and with wider availability, as it's otherwise a solid Mini-ITX motherboard.