ASUS ROG STRIX Z590-E Gaming WiFi Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

The Z590-E looks like a beast from the time you get it out of the box. On the first take, I quite like what I am seeing. The sort of RGB AREAS we can see on the heatsinks are a nice touch and adds a bit of colour to a mostly black board. The little cutouts in the heatsinks should be just big enough to allow some of the airflows from your case to flow through them, allowing for even better heat dissipation than if they were solid. The only thing I would’ve liked to see off the bat was some shielding on the RAM slots. Now, I know it’s not as needed as it is on PCIe slots, I just think when the PCIe slots are done, it ties everything together nicely.

P.S. that little bracket you see below the EPS power connectors is so you can mount the included VRM fan to help keep things that much cooler.

For EPS connectors, we have an 8-pin and a 4-pin which will be more than enough to offer power to our CPU and a stable and efficient manner.

There’s quite a lot going on across the top half of the Z590-E. We have two fan headers, both a 5v aRGB and 12v RGB connectors, DeBug LED, a 24-pin power connector, USB 3.2 Gen2x2 header and a USB 3.2 Gen 1 header. ASUS has also gone with a 14+2 Power Phase design to help ensure power is getting to where it is needed the most and remaining stable at the same time.

Right, this M.2 business is becoming a bit of a headache, It’s great we finally have PCIe 4.0 support, but it can be a pain figuring out what ports do and don’t support it. Remember, in order to use PCIe 4.0 at all, you must be on an 11th GEN CPU. Either way, there is room for up to four M.2 drives so that should be plenty of storage for most. Personally, I can’t wait for prices to sort themselves out on memory-based products so I can pick up some more M.2 drives and get rid of my old SATA drives and their cables. For full M.2 specification, please see the below, which was taken from the Z590-E Product Page.

.2_1 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280/22110

– Only Intel® 11th Core™ processors support PCIe 4.0 x4 mode, this slot will be disabled for other CPUs

M.2_2 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280/22110

– Intel® 11th processors support PCIe 4.0 x4 mode

– Intel® 10th processors support PCIe 3.0 x4 mode

Intel® Z590 Chipset

M.2_3 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280/22110 (supports PCIe 3.0 x4 mode)

M.2_4 slot (Key M), type 2242/2260/2280 (supports PCIe 3.0 x4 & SATA modes)*

The ROG SupremeFX Audio uses software and hardware to offer a good audio experience. ASUS has gone with the ALC4080 codec with a Savitech SV3H712 amplifier to help and offer the best audio experience possible from their Z590-E. Let us also not forget about those lovely Premium Nichicon™ Audio Capacitors that help to provide further clarity.

On the side of the board, we have SATA 6Gb/s ports. Please note that when using the M.2_4 slot that the SATA6G_2 will be disabled. This is due to the M.2_4 support SATA mode as well as PCIe.

Not very many headers going across the bottom of the board. We have a 2nd set of 5v aRGB and 12v RGB headers, our HD Audio Header, 2x USB2 headers our CMOS batter and just to the right of that, a water pump header and our front panel connectors.

As we have seen on most Z590 boards, there is a massive amount of connections on the rear IO. We have 10 x USB ports, dual LAN ports, 5 Audio jacks, Display Port and HDMI ports and more! A couple of the more handy featured are going to be from the pair of buttons. We have a Clear CMOS button, which does just that, clears the CMOS and sets it back to default. This is handy should you have any issues when overclocking or changing settings, or sometimes even installing a new GPU may require you to Clear CMOS for some odd reason. Next, the BIOS FLBK (Flashback) button will revert your BIOS to the previous version. While it is always nice to upgrade BIOS, sometimes it doesn’t work out and being able to easily revert back to the previous version is great.

1 x USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 port (1 x USB Type-C®)

3 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 port(s) (2 x Type-A, 1 x USB Type-C® )

4 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 port(s) (4 x Type-A)

2 x USB 2.0 port(s) (2 x Type-A)

1 x HDMI™ port

1 x DisplayPort

1 x Intel® Wi-Fi 6E

2 x Intel® I225-V 2.5Gb Ethernet

5 x Gold-plated audio jacks

1 x Optical S/PDIF out port

1 x BIOS FlashBack™ button

1 x Clear CMOS button

Again, nothing going on the backside of the motherboard except for a cheeky STRIX logo looking at us!