ASUS ROG STRIX Z790-A Gaming-WiFi II Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

Well, as usual, ASUS has got the aesthetics just right on this one. For this price range, we do usually see a more full-armour aesthetic on the lower half, but I like that it’s built into zones with heatsinks for all the major components, making it feel very modular.

The CPU is flanked by two significantly sized heatsinks, with deep fins cut into the brushed aluminium, and they provide a striking contrast against the black PCB too.

There’s a heatsink for the top M.2 socket, and to the right of that the Q-Release button for the primary PCIe 5.0 slot. Below that, there’s the main chipset heatsink, and then two further heatsinks below that for the additional M.2 slots, with two screws holding each in place for reasonably easy access.

The motherboard uses the same high-quality black capacitors throughout its design too, which is always good to see.

There are two CPU power connectors, and with their reinforced ProCool II design, they can handle higher power and maintain lower temperatures.

There are four DIMM slots, supporting up to 192GB DDR5 up to 8000 MHz (OC).

The board supports 4 SATA devices, fewer than previous generations, but the market has steadily shifted to M.2 and there’s plenty of those.

There’s a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot at the top, which is heavily reinforced to deal with bulky GPUs, a single PCIe 4.0 X16 sized slot wired as X4, and a PCIe 3.0 x1 Slot. There’s also some nice audio hardware with the ROG SupremeFX 5.1 Surround Sound High Definition Audio CODEC using the ALC4080 chipset and Savitech SV3H712 AMP.

At the back, there’s not a lot going on here, just a bit of a digital graphic.

The rear I/O is pretty packed, with a plethora of USB Type-A ports, there are four USB 2, four USB 5Gbps, two 10Gbps, as well as USB Type-C 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps. You also get both HDMI and DisplayPort, WiFi 7, 2.5 Gbps LAN and audio outputs. Some rival products do have 5 to 10 Gbps LAN and there’s no 40 Gbps Type-C, but really, not many people actually need those.

With the armour stripped away, we can see there’s a pretty robust-looking VRM configuration on the top half, as well as lots of M.2 mounts on the lower half.

It utilises a 16+1+2 Power Stage design with 70A MOSFETS, and when combined with those massive heatsinks, this board shouldn’t have any issues with power delivery to the CPU.

There’s a full-size PCIe 4.0 M.2 above the primary PCIe 5.0 lane and four more PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots on the lower section of the motherboard. With the addition of four SATA ports, you’re unlikely to be lacking storage space here.

Finally, we see the rear of the heatsinks, which come with a good quality thermal compound on both, although I would have liked to see a heatpipe to bridge the two sections.