Asus B150I Pro Gaming Aura Review

It is pretty clear that the RGB lighting is in trend this year. There are so many products on the market featuring RGB lighting in many different ways. Asus B150I Pro Gaming Aura is one of those as well. It was first announced in November 2015. Its Mini ITX Form Factor offers support for one graphics card and 2x DIMM slots for max. 32GB, DDR4 2133 MHz Non-ECC, Un-buffered Dual Channel Memory. Let’s have a look if it’s any good.

As always, the packaging is very attractive on the front side, and most important specifications can be found at the back side. As there isn’t so much accessories included, the packaging is quite small. The package includes I/O shield (ASUS Q-Shield), 2x SATA 6GB/s cables, User’s manual, M.2 2242 mounting kit, 1x M.2 Screw Package, 1x pack of cable ties, 1x CPU installation tool, 1x Supporting DVD, 1x 12 in 1 cable labels.

Asus B150I Pro Gaming Aura come with the red/black color theme, which is still pretty popular. Its Mini ITX Form Factor (17 cm x 17 cm) offers us the option to use it in any small cases, and so it’s perfectly suitable for tiny LAN party gaming systems or HTPCs, etc. It’s not a high-end mainboard and so not really designed to overclock CPU. The chipset doesn’t even officially support any overclocking or voltage adjustment.

There is only so much space this tiny mainboard can offer, and so ASUS had to made some compromises offering us only 4x SATA 6GB/s ports and one M.2 port, which can be mounted at the back side of the mainboard. The placement of M.2 is showed on official ASUS website.

The size of this mainboard allows to use only single x16 PCIe slot for graphics card. There are two mini-ITX versions of ASUS B150I Pro Gaming Aura. One features 802.11ac WiFi and the other (our sample) features only Gigabite LAN port. The prize difference is around €10 between them.

When it comes to limitations, it’s clear that this is value oriented mainboard mainly targeting mid-range gaming customers. It features proper power delivery and tough components as quality chokes and capacitors.

Sound quality is actually not bad at all, thanks to Supreme FX onboard audio chipset which is separated from the rest of the mainboard as prevention against unpleasant EMI noise. Premium audio caps, Headphone AMP, 112dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), shielded SupremeFX technology and voltage 5V protection delivers flawless in-game audio without any interference noise.

Both B150I Pro Gaming/WiFi/Aura and B150I Pro Gaming/Aura feature couple onboard thermal sensors and support for PWM fan control over 4pin fan header. There are 3x 4pin onboard fan headers, one for CPU right next to a 4pin water pump header and one case fan header close to PCIE slot on the other side of the mainboard. I/O panel offers not much, but at least we have 2x USB3.0, Gigabyte LAN(RJ45) port, 1x PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo port, 2x USB 2.0,  DVI, HDMI, 1x USB 3.0 Type-C,  1x Optical S/PDIF out, and 6x audio jacks. The included Q- connector (front panel connector) extension cord might be helpful, if you plan to install the mainboad in bigger chassis.

Last but not least is the awesome customizable RGB LED illumination at the back side of the mainboard which gives it that R.O.G. atmosphere. There are eleven pre-selected macros schemes. Of course, you have many options to customize your own color spectrum and style with help of ASUS AURA software.

Asus B150I Pro Gaming Aura Features:

• LGA1151 socket for 6th-genereation Intel® Core™ i7 / Core i5 / Core i3, Pentium® and Celeron processors
• Dual-channel DDR4 2133 support Max. 32GB, DDR4 2133 MHz Non-ECC
• SupremeFX: Flawless audio that makes you part of the game
• Sonic Radar ll: Scan and detect your enemies to dominate
• Intel Gigabit Ethernet and LANGuard: Top-speed protected networking
• RAMCache: Speed up your game loads
• Gamer’s Guardian: Highly-durable components and smart DIY features
• M.2: Ultra-speedy transfers for faster gaming
• 1 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x16 mode)
• Intel® I219V, 1 x Gigabit LAN Controller
• Mini ITX Form Factor

Standard UEFI Bios includes most important options among others also Q-fan Control for fan speed mode adjustment.

Test methodology:

To ensure that the results from one review to another are comparable, the Test Methodology will be the same throughout all reviews, otherwise we will make a note if somethings changed and keep it separately from other results.

All testing was done on test Bench-table with a room ambient temperature of 22- 23°C.

Testing System:

Test Results:

Conclusion:

The Asus B150I Pro Gaming Aura is a tiny little  mITX mainboard mainly designed to target gaming community which does not care much about super features and overcloking craziness. The prize €100 is a bit steep, almost touching the Z170 price level. The selling point would probably be its RGB LED illumination, which looks really awesome, some minor onboard features as well as M.2 support. For decent gaming experience you would definitively need some interesting graphics card in range of GTX960 or preferably GTX970 or similar. Nice to see is also onboard pump 4pin header should you wish to go with watercooling of CPU. Lack of DDR4 memory support would probably not disturb users who decide to buy this product. At a time of this review, high clocked DDR4 module are not cheap at all, and it wouldn’t make much sense for gamers to invest in RAM if they use this value-class mainboard anyway. From our side it’s Silver Recommendation.