Asrock B850I Lightning WiFi w Ryzen 9900x ok?

gizmo1990 · 15 Feb 2026 at 14:53

I'm hovering over the buy button on this motherboard but thought I'd run it past any users here or ones with experience of it.

During my trawl of info on the board there was some issues around 90003d cpus but they were quite a while back now. Anyway, I'd be using it with my new 9900x. Does anyone know of any issues which would prevent me going with it? It seems a good choice price/performance wise and gets good reviews, toms hardware etc.

Any advice much appreciated.

Tetras · 15 Feb 2026 at 14:59

It is still a controversial subject about where the problem is (on the board? on the CPU? both?) and if the BIOS updates actually fix anything, but so far as I'm aware: the issue is not limited to X3D CPUs. They're just far more commonly reported.

If it was my money, I probably wouldn't buy one, unless the deal is really good (am aware availability of ITX boards is limited).

If you haven't seen it already, see this thread:

Arock board with a 9800x3d??

is there a list of the boards that have been killing CPU's. i got an Asrock x870 pro rs off the MM and i have a 9800x3d but i didnt realise it was an Asrock until it got delivered hahaha the board came with a 7600x that i was going to put in my media canter, but now i dont know what to do

forums.overclockers.co.uk

gizmo1990 · 15 Feb 2026 at 15:26

Thanks for the reply @Tetras Damn, that's annoying. I've been deliberating over this for ages and thought I'm come to a decision.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for a board to pair with my 9900x? The conditions I need are it must be mini-itx, support pcie gen 5 and have a decent selection of USB ports.

One other slightly annoying facet is that I'd like it to play nicely with Linux compatibility. I'm intending to ween myself off win so the machine will be dual boot. And I've heard that Linux can be a bit fussy with newer motherboards especially mediatek wifi equipped ones?

Any advice really appreciated.

momo56 · 15 Feb 2026 at 16:25

gizmo1990 said:
Thanks for the reply @Tetras Damn, that's annoying. I've been deliberating over this for ages and thought I'm come to a decision.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for a board to pair with my 9900x? The conditions I need are it must be mini-itx, support pcie gen 5 and have a decent selection of USB ports.

One other slightly annoying facet is that I'd like it to play nicely with Linux compatibility. I'm intending to ween myself off win so the machine will be dual boot. And I've heard that Linux can be a bit fussy with newer motherboards especially mediatek wifi equipped ones?

Any advice really appreciated.

Asus b650e-i is a solid board with decent bios updates. Has gen5. Not sure how many USBs you need.

Asus ROG Strix B650E-I Gaming WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 Mini ITX Motherboard

Order Asus ROG Strix B650E-I Gaming WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 Mini ITX Motherboard now online and benefit from fast delivery.

www.overclockers.co.uk

Also if you plan on rendering or something that uses the full TDP of the 9900x you may need a fan on the VRMs. The MSI X870-i that I have for example hits 100c+ on the VRMs at 270W.

edit: no idea on Linux, but the Wifi card can be swapped out.

gizmo1990 · 16 Feb 2026 at 09:35

Thanks for the reply @momo56 I didn't think it would be this difficult to settle on a motherboard nowadays! Mini itx obviously slims down the pickings but sheesh. Every board seems to have potentially quite large issues. From very high price points, poor component placement, high temps and even cpu wrecking.

Perhaps dropping down to a 650 is the best bet.

kaku · 16 Feb 2026 at 09:55

Buying an AM5 board is a bit of a mess in part due to misleading chipset naming. B650/E - B850 only guarantees 'minimum' board specs from AMD so you will find higher-end B650E boards surpassing B850 in many cases.

It really depends on what compromises were made by the manufacturer for a specific board.

I personally went for the ROG Strix B650E-I because it has PCI-E 5.0 16x and PCI-E 5.0 4x slots, but you're trading between 2.5/5 GBe, PCI-E/NVME slot speed, USB4, and ultimately price.

gizmo1990 · 16 Feb 2026 at 10:13

@kaku That's interesting about the minimum board specs. The price of B650E boards is quite annoyingly high but what's giving me a slight pause over the ASUs is the reports of coil whine. How have you found yours?

gizmo1990 · 16 Feb 2026 at 14:39

After going down the coil whine rabbit hole I'm considering the Asrock 650i Lightning now..

Anyone have any experience of the board? The main downside appears to be it's pci e 4, but I don't mind running my PCIe 5 ssd slower.

kaku · 16 Feb 2026 at 17:06

gizmo1990 said:
@kaku That's interesting about the minimum board specs. The price of B650E boards is quite annoyingly high but what's giving me a slight pause over the ASUs is the reports of coil whine. How have you found yours?

Yeah on mine there is definitely audible chirping under certain loads. I haven't tried messing with any VRM settings yet but depending on how bad it is under regular use I might consider some kind of damping for the chokes.

gizmo1990 · 17 Feb 2026 at 09:23

@kaku Thanks for that.

I'm swinging back to towards Asrock boards now. Either the 650 or 850. The annoying thing is that there's little price difference between them. I'd go with the 650 for safer compatibility and perhaps less chance of coil whine but it's still fairly expensive. The 850 is newer and will support the 9900x out of the box but perhaps more chance of coil whine. It's a lottery it seems. But the 850 has got good reviews from several sites.

Either way asrock seem to be less susceptible to coil whine than other brands but who knows. ASUs might just get lots of stick simply because more people have bought them. Asus are the go to brand in my experience.

Can't believe this is such a hard choice!

tamzzy · 17 Feb 2026 at 09:59

i bought the asus B650E-I for black friday 2024 for £135. it's very nice board but i sold it on as i didn't need all the features.
in the end, i settled on a chinese board - jginyue b650i - instead, for a fraction of the price (i think i paid just £49).

if you want a top end b650i board you can't go too wrong with the asus B650E-I

gizmo1990 · 17 Feb 2026 at 12:12

@tamzzy Did you have any coil whine with your ASUs 650? I think what's putting me off a 650 is that it is last gen yet with current gen pricing! Plus I have to faff around with updating the bios because of my 9900x, which puts an extra layer of unpredictability in the purchase.

tamzzy · 17 Feb 2026 at 12:19

gizmo1990 said:
Did you have any coil whine with your ASUs 650?

no

gizmo1990 said:
I think what's putting me off a 650 is that it is last gen yet with current gen pricing!

that's a silly way to look at it.
it's only "last gen" in name only
tell me something that a b850 board has that the b650e-i doesn't?
clue: there isn't

gizmo1990 said:
Plus I have to faff around with updating the bios because of my 9900x, which puts an extra layer of unpredictability in the purchase.

yes, it is an extra step, but it's really not that hard with bios flashback nowadays

gizmo1990 · 17 Feb 2026 at 13:23

From what I've been reading the 850s offer a generally more refined experience/features with more support for pcie 5 etc. Price wise there's little difference between the two, which further pushes me towards an 850.

Of course the elephant in the room is also the price increase in both these boards now. Hence I'd be paying a considerable amount just for a 650. Making the reasoning that if I'm paying so much just for a 650, I might as well pay the small extra for a 850.

tamzzy · 17 Feb 2026 at 13:51

gizmo1990 said:
From what I've been reading the 850s offer a generally more refined experience/features with more support for pcie 5 etc.

The Asus board in question also has pcie 5 to the GPU and ssd

tamzzy · 17 Feb 2026 at 13:52

gizmo1990 said:
Of course the elephant in the room is also the price increase in both these boards now. Hence I'd be paying a considerable amount just for a 650. Making the reasoning that if I'm paying so much just for a 650, I might as well pay the small extra for a 850.

The b650e, is for all intents, the same as a b850

Moeks · 23 Feb 2026 at 10:56

gizmo1990 said:
After going down the coil whine rabbit hole I'm considering the Asrock 650i Lightning now..

Anyone have any experience of the board? The main downside appears to be it's pci e 4, but I don't mind running my PCIe 5 ssd slower.

Yes I have been using that board with a 7900X3D, 64GB of ram and a 4080 Super for not far off a year a now, April 25, never had an issue with it. The only thing it's missing that the B850 has is the PCI-E Gen 5 M2 slot I think.

To give some context I moved the same hardware from an Asus B650 TUF Gaming Plus Wifi as I wanted to rebuild to mini ITX, interestingly it's actually been a better experience than the Asus board, it boots faster and more importantly is more stable with my 64GB of Patriot DDR 6000 ram, I could never get that quite right on the Asus and it would regularly go into long memory retraining sessions and then fall back to JDEC anyway (on any Bios I tried), the Asrock B650I has never had those issues, so I can't really fault it. However worth mentioning the Asus board did not have those issues with the original 32GB of GSkill Trident Z 6000 memory I was using, it worked perfectly with that set and still does.