ASUS Z490 Motherboard Preview

ASUS ROG Maximum XII HERO WiFi

Moving onto the Hero, this is obviously a much more premium and much more expensive board, but it’s great to see ASUS has their usual huge range of options for every budget on the way.

I’ve seen a bunch of amazing motherboard design for this upcoming launch and this is certainly one of the best. It’s an amazing looking motherboard, but everything is so dark on it, you really have to look for a while to see everything!

The CPU has one of the biggest VRM cooling configurations I’ve ever seen. Not one, not two, but THREE massive heatsinks with an equally enormous heat pipe running through all of them. That’s some seriously heavy metal on here, and it’ll help in a BIG way while overclocking.

The CPU runs of a single 8-pin which is armoured. However, there’s an additional 4-pin if you need the extra stability for extreme overclocking and more demanding CPUs.

The lower chipset heatsink looks superb, with a glossy black finish and a mirror chrome ASUS eye logo on it. Plus, that feeds into the M.2 heatsinks and is also extended to shroud some of the motherboard, which just looks neater than bare PCB.

You’re not short for storage options here either, with 3 x M.2 drive mounts under the heatsinks. Plus, there are three full-size PCIe slots and two 1x slots. Only the top two are armoured though.

You’ll find additional storage ports here, with six SATA ports on offer.

Audio should get a huge boost too thanks to their implementation of SupremeFX, ASS DAC and OP Amp.

Finally at the rear, we have plenty of USB ports, including USB Type-C. Networking comes from a Marvel 5GbE port, an Intel 1GbE port, as well as super fast 802.11ax WiFi with MU-MIMO.