**The ASUS PRIME Z790-A Motherboard: A Comprehensive Review**

I recently had the opportunity to work with the ASUS PRIME Z790-A motherboard, and I must say that it's a beast of a board. The first thing I noticed was the lack of XMP options or DOCP options on the BIOS settings. It seemed like it was a will-it-boot situation, but fortunately, ASUS had some more up-to-date BIOS on their website. In fact, the O407 is so old that it's not even on the ASUS website anymore. Maybe Microcenter was expected to update these before selling them to customers? I don't know, but yeah, I have a feeling that somebody bought this motherboard put their CPU in it maybe they were able to get some DDR5 RAM and nothing because there was nothing wrong with the motherboard and I did not have to RMA it, but I did save a few bucks off the cost of the motherboard because of the yellow tag from Microcenter.

**BIOS Features**

When it comes to BIOS features, this board is pretty standard ASUS. Everything is pretty much working as expected, and Alder Lake performance, power delivery, performance cores, efficiency cores, all that stuff is here if you disable your efficiency cores you do get AVX 512 the instruction set. If that's important to you, mostly I'm going to say no unless you already know are read in on those kind of things it doesn't really matter too much if you're trying to make a decision between an i5 i7 i9 there's no gaming performance difference not really between the i7 and the i9 so you can save a couple hundred bucks get the i7 really you only lose four efficiency cores and Windows 11 goes out of its way to make sure that you're not using those efficiency cores for gaming anyway. So, really have you lost much? The i5 is also a little bit bananas with 12-600K six performance cores and four efficiency cores ten cores total ten cores for an i5 that's that's crazy and also around $300 a little bit less a little bit more depending on where you are there's some other i5 cpus that are coming if they're not already out by the time this video is out that I'm going to take a look at but this motherboard might be overkill if you're going for something like an i5.

**Power Delivery Circuitry**

The power delivery circuitry here is really designed for the i9 and even overclocking. Now, in terms of Linux support, Linux support is actually really weird right now. These Alder Lake cpus use an extension of Turbo Boost Max 3.0 the way that was implemented in the Linux kernel so there's bugs if you have an i5 because historically the i5 had not supported Turbo Boost Max 3.0 you're going to have a bad time. The ASUS BIOS actually does work with Linux to do the scheduling hints correctly, so there's a structure that's in proc you can check out the level one forum you can come there there's a couple threads that describe this but in a nutshell if you disable XMP this motherboard will correctly report the hints that are necessary for the scheduler in Linux to make decisions about scheduling on pcores e-cores and hyper-threaded cores. If you enable XMP at least as of the 1129 BIOS for this motherboard all of the cpus are treated equally including the hyper-threaded cores which seems like a mistake so Linux on Alder Lake in general is a bit weird.

**Linux Support**

I'm going to dive deeper into Linux support because it's pretty weird. The i225v is reasonably well supported on Linux sometimes you get an error like -19 because it has trouble loading the driver and that's a whole other dimension of crazy that you have to deal with but the Supreme FX which is you know really a real tech chipset is pretty well supported on Linux and all of the other onboard features for this motherboard pretty well supported in Linux. You can configure your fans through the BIOS so that you don't have to worry too much about that kind of thing in Linux but for Linux specific stuff you can check out the Linux channel.

**Overall Assessment**

Overall, it's a good motherboard from ASUS, they're a pretty good brand they like to think they're the best. It's a pretty well put together motherboard if you're doing a gaming build you really wouldn't go wrong picking this motherboard there's not really anything that dramatically sets it apart if anything for the standard issue price tag of $399 you might be able to get a little bit more features a little bit better deal but the motherboard is really well put together for what you get especially in terms of power delivery and the DDR5 memory aspect of it. And overclocking if you're looking for the best bang for your buck I think DDR4 right now with a less expensive motherboard for Alder Lake with the i7 overall is the best bang for your buck but if you're looking for a higher end system with an i9 that's what this board is for.

**Conclusion**

The ASUS PRIME Z790-A motherboard is a solid choice for anyone looking to build a gaming PC or overclock their CPU. While it may not have all the bells and whistles, it delivers in terms of performance and power delivery. If you're looking for a good balance between price and performance, this board might be worth considering. However, if you're looking for something more exotic or feature-rich, you might want to consider other options.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh boy it's strix motherboard review time the rog strix z690f gaming wi-fi with bonus why did they return it to micro center minigame let's take a look so this is the rog strix z690f gaming wi-fi as i said it's 16 plus one power stages support for pci express 4.0 m.2 and it's got a really cool slot release for gpus there's a lot to like when you buy an asus motherboard you can go all out you can get a really expensive motherboard but usually if you want you know the best bang for the buck but you still want the gamer features the strix the strix is where it's at and that's why it's one of the most popular models at micro center this one was about 70 off why was this 70 off now this this is a chunker of an atx motherboard uh there is no rear metal backplate or rear anything with the vrm's or anything like that but there are two large metal heat sinks connected by heat pipe on the corner this is a 16 plus one power delivery system so you know the 12 900k that intel mega juiced 241 watts this motherboard can run it alder like power usage is actually a story in and of itself if i might digress for just a moment the uh power usage levels of the 12 900k are a little bit overstated as far as gamers are concerned in fact my initial review i said oh boy it loves to drink the power and for multi-core workloads things like blender and cinebench and rendering and things like that oh boy it loves to drink the power there's also anomalous things that happen when you're playing games so like take for example tomb raider we're playing tomb raider with a high-end gpu it's something like 1080p on the 11 900k when the game is busy doing something with the gpu and the cpu doesn't have a lot to do the cpu doesn't consume a lot of power on most z690 motherboards the 12900k continues to consume a lot of power making a lot of heat and other unpleasantness that you have to deal with and so if you just really quickly look at that it looks like the cpu is using a lot of power relative to the prior generation even though technically the 1100k could also consume 241 watts in pl2 it's confusing nuanced situation the reality is if you step down to something like the 12 700k the number of fps per watt that you get is actually comparable to the competing platform it's pretty close uh when some lose some depends on motherboard particulars motherboard efficiency and some other variables that we'll get into it also makes a pretty big difference depending on if you're using the 6900 xt from team red as opposed to something like the 3080ti or 3090 from team green it's a really odd situation but this is a motherboard review and we're focused on the rog strix z690f gaming wi-fi the pcie layout the pcie layout on this motherboard for this price point i would have liked a better pcie layout we have our primary x16 slot which is pci express 5.0 directly into the cpu all of our other pcie slots are connected to the chipset now the chipset has a pci express by eight link from the cpu to the chipset okay technically it's a pci express 4.0 by eight equivalent the dmi link but eight pci express four lanes of bandwidth there's a lot of bandwidth from your cpu to a chipset we do have a pci express by eight slot at the bottom we have two pci express 3.0 m.2s back to back here one pci express 4 slot here connected to the chipset and then our pc express 4 slot here just below the cpu that is connected directly to the cpu so that is a total of four m.2s on this board to pc x press 4 to pci express 3. that's a pretty good amount of pci connectivity for this desktop platform this is a ddr5 motherboard and i tested it with kingston fury memory running at 5200 because omg but getting your hands on ddr5 is really not a lot of fun right now the m.2 cooling is pretty good as well the one below the cpu is hooked up so that you've got a heatsink above and below the m.2 so it's going to pull heat away from the top at the bottom of the m.2 it's a nice touch so this motherboard has a total of eight four pin fan headers two at the top edge of the motherboard two just below the cpu socket one in the bottom corner of the motherboard three along the bottom and that's eight in terms of front panel usb connections there's one 30 pin connector and there's one type c connector the front panel usb c header is a type c header for a two by two configuration that is 20 gigabit and if your case supports a 20 gigabit usb front panel type c well there you go you can use it with this motherboard in addition there are also two more usb 2.0 ports at the bottom so it gives you a total of four usable usb 2.0 ports for any other peripherals that you might have such as water cooling or whatever that might want an internal usb 2.0 header in terms of power delivery we have two standard eight pin power connectors atx at the top edge of the motherboard with alder lake i mean even as crazy as it is you really only need one of those but hey there's two here just in case also got our 24 pin atx power connector at the front edge of the motherboard nothing unexpected there in terms of other connectors i haven't covered well of course at the bottom you've got your front panel connection and your front panel audio but there's an additional temperature sensor t sensor right here on the front edge which will give you an extra analog temperature sensor that you can put in your case and have your fans or the rest of your system react depending on what you're looking for the motherboard also has six six gigabit per second sata ports some of those resources are shared with other resources on the board you're going to want to double check the manual to know which ports are shared with what connectors in order to make decisions about which thing goes where you've also got this velcro cable retention thing which is kind of a lot of fun if you're noticing the cpu socket on this motherboard has moved a little bit more toward the front edge of the motherboard than i'm used to but that's because the vrm cooling area is so large look at this so much room for vrm in terms of rear i o we have displayport and hdmi out that is for the onboard igpu solution we have two usb 2.0 including a bios flashback solution we've got four usb 5 gigabit ports two usb type a 10 gigabit ports two usb type c ports one 20 gig one 10 gig we've got our 2.5 gig nick the 2.5 gig dick is an intel i-225v uh it is an intel wireless wi-fi 6e solution plus the intel 225v nic it's pretty awesome then we've got our supreme fx audio 7.1 with optical spdif out overall in terms of the board and the aesthetic and everything else i think asus has done a pretty good job putting this together i think the pcie layout could have been a little bit better but i really like the release button for the gpu that's really innovative especially if you change your gpu a lot or you need to pop things in and out of the system it's a great feature for somebody like me for you i don't know how often are you changing your gpu now for the return the mini game i was hinting about it did you figure out why it was returned well this motherboard out of the box had bios version 0407 bias version 407 i don't think was ever meant to see the light of day there weren't even any xmp options or docp options or anything to do with memory tuning basically it's a will it boot situation fortunately asus had some more up-to-date bios on their website in fact o407 is so old that it's not on the asus website how crazy is that maybe microcenter was expected to update these before selling them to customers i don't know but yeah i have a feeling that somebody bought this motherboard put their cpu in it maybe they were able to get some ddr5 ram and nothing because there was nothing wrong with the motherboard and i did not have to rma it but i did save a few bucks off the cost of the the motherboard because of the yellow tag from micro center in terms of other bios features you go through this it's a pretty standard asus bios everything is pretty much working as expected and alder like performance performance cores efficiency cores all that stuff is here if you disable your efficiency cores you do get avx 512 the instruction set if that's important to you mostly i'm going to say no unless you already you know are read in on those kind of things it doesn't really matter too much if you're trying to make a decision between an i5 i7 i9 there's no gaming performance difference not really between the i7 and the i9 so you can save a couple hundred bucks get the i7 really you only lose four efficiency cores and windows 11 goes out of its way to make sure that you're not using those efficiency cores for gaming anyway so really have you lost much the i5 is also a little bit bananas the 12 600k six performance cores and four efficiency cores 10 cores total 10 cores for an i5 that's that's crazy and also around 300 a little bit less a little bit more depending on where you are there's some other i5 cpus that are coming if they're not already out by the time this video is out that i'm going to take a look at but this motherboard might be overkill if you're going for something like an i5 the power delivery circuitry here is really designed for the i9 and even overclocking now in terms of linux support linux support is actually really weird right now so these alder lake cpus use an extension of turbo boost max 3.0 the way that was implemented in the linux kernel so there's bugs if you have an i5 because historically the i5 had not supported turbo boost max 3.0 you're going to have a bad time the asus bios actually does work with linux to do the scheduling hints correctly so there's a there's a structure that's in proc you can check out the level one forum you can come there there's a couple threads that describe this but in a nutshell if you disable xmp this motherboard will correctly report the hints that are necessary for the scheduler in linux to make decisions about scheduling on pcor's e-cores and hyper-threaded cores if you enable xmp at least as of the 1129 bios for this motherboard all of the cpus are treated equally including the hyper-threaded cores which seems like a mistake so linux on alder lake in general is a bit weird the i225v is reasonably well supported on linux sometimes you get an error like -19 because it has trouble loading the driver and that's a whole other dimension of crazy that you have to deal with but the supreme fx which is you know really a real tech chipset is pretty well supported on linux and all of the other onboard features for this motherboard pretty well supported in linux you can configure your fans through the bios so that you don't have to worry too much about that kind of thing in linux but for linux specific stuff you can check out the linux channel and we'll talk a little bit more about that overall it's a good motherboard asus is a pretty good brand they're they like to think they're the best uh it's a pretty well put together motherboard if you're doing a gaming build you really wouldn't go wrong picking this motherboard there's not really anything that dramatically sets it apart if anything for the standard issue price tag of 399 you might be able to get a little bit more features a little bit better deal but the motherboard is really well put together for what you get especially in terms of power delivery and the ddr5 memory aspect of it and overclocking if you're looking for the best bang for your buck i think ddr4 right now with a less expensive motherboard for alder lake with the i7 overall is the best bang for your buck but if you're looking for a higher end system with an i9 a ddr5 it's a pretty good choice immobile this is level one i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forumsoh boy it's strix motherboard review time the rog strix z690f gaming wi-fi with bonus why did they return it to micro center minigame let's take a look so this is the rog strix z690f gaming wi-fi as i said it's 16 plus one power stages support for pci express 4.0 m.2 and it's got a really cool slot release for gpus there's a lot to like when you buy an asus motherboard you can go all out you can get a really expensive motherboard but usually if you want you know the best bang for the buck but you still want the gamer features the strix the strix is where it's at and that's why it's one of the most popular models at micro center this one was about 70 off why was this 70 off now this this is a chunker of an atx motherboard uh there is no rear metal backplate or rear anything with the vrm's or anything like that but there are two large metal heat sinks connected by heat pipe on the corner this is a 16 plus one power delivery system so you know the 12 900k that intel mega juiced 241 watts this motherboard can run it alder like power usage is actually a story in and of itself if i might digress for just a moment the uh power usage levels of the 12 900k are a little bit overstated as far as gamers are concerned in fact my initial review i said oh boy it loves to drink the power and for multi-core workloads things like blender and cinebench and rendering and things like that oh boy it loves to drink the power there's also anomalous things that happen when you're playing games so like take for example tomb raider we're playing tomb raider with a high-end gpu it's something like 1080p on the 11 900k when the game is busy doing something with the gpu and the cpu doesn't have a lot to do the cpu doesn't consume a lot of power on most z690 motherboards the 12900k continues to consume a lot of power making a lot of heat and other unpleasantness that you have to deal with and so if you just really quickly look at that it looks like the cpu is using a lot of power relative to the prior generation even though technically the 1100k could also consume 241 watts in pl2 it's confusing nuanced situation the reality is if you step down to something like the 12 700k the number of fps per watt that you get is actually comparable to the competing platform it's pretty close uh when some lose some depends on motherboard particulars motherboard efficiency and some other variables that we'll get into it also makes a pretty big difference depending on if you're using the 6900 xt from team red as opposed to something like the 3080ti or 3090 from team green it's a really odd situation but this is a motherboard review and we're focused on the rog strix z690f gaming wi-fi the pcie layout the pcie layout on this motherboard for this price point i would have liked a better pcie layout we have our primary x16 slot which is pci express 5.0 directly into the cpu all of our other pcie slots are connected to the chipset now the chipset has a pci express by eight link from the cpu to the chipset okay technically it's a pci express 4.0 by eight equivalent the dmi link but eight pci express four lanes of bandwidth there's a lot of bandwidth from your cpu to a chipset we do have a pci express by eight slot at the bottom we have two pci express 3.0 m.2s back to back here one pci express 4 slot here connected to the chipset and then our pc express 4 slot here just below the cpu that is connected directly to the cpu so that is a total of four m.2s on this board to pc x press 4 to pci express 3. that's a pretty good amount of pci connectivity for this desktop platform this is a ddr5 motherboard and i tested it with kingston fury memory running at 5200 because omg but getting your hands on ddr5 is really not a lot of fun right now the m.2 cooling is pretty good as well the one below the cpu is hooked up so that you've got a heatsink above and below the m.2 so it's going to pull heat away from the top at the bottom of the m.2 it's a nice touch so this motherboard has a total of eight four pin fan headers two at the top edge of the motherboard two just below the cpu socket one in the bottom corner of the motherboard three along the bottom and that's eight in terms of front panel usb connections there's one 30 pin connector and there's one type c connector the front panel usb c header is a type c header for a two by two configuration that is 20 gigabit and if your case supports a 20 gigabit usb front panel type c well there you go you can use it with this motherboard in addition there are also two more usb 2.0 ports at the bottom so it gives you a total of four usable usb 2.0 ports for any other peripherals that you might have such as water cooling or whatever that might want an internal usb 2.0 header in terms of power delivery we have two standard eight pin power connectors atx at the top edge of the motherboard with alder lake i mean even as crazy as it is you really only need one of those but hey there's two here just in case also got our 24 pin atx power connector at the front edge of the motherboard nothing unexpected there in terms of other connectors i haven't covered well of course at the bottom you've got your front panel connection and your front panel audio but there's an additional temperature sensor t sensor right here on the front edge which will give you an extra analog temperature sensor that you can put in your case and have your fans or the rest of your system react depending on what you're looking for the motherboard also has six six gigabit per second sata ports some of those resources are shared with other resources on the board you're going to want to double check the manual to know which ports are shared with what connectors in order to make decisions about which thing goes where you've also got this velcro cable retention thing which is kind of a lot of fun if you're noticing the cpu socket on this motherboard has moved a little bit more toward the front edge of the motherboard than i'm used to but that's because the vrm cooling area is so large look at this so much room for vrm in terms of rear i o we have displayport and hdmi out that is for the onboard igpu solution we have two usb 2.0 including a bios flashback solution we've got four usb 5 gigabit ports two usb type a 10 gigabit ports two usb type c ports one 20 gig one 10 gig we've got our 2.5 gig nick the 2.5 gig dick is an intel i-225v uh it is an intel wireless wi-fi 6e solution plus the intel 225v nic it's pretty awesome then we've got our supreme fx audio 7.1 with optical spdif out overall in terms of the board and the aesthetic and everything else i think asus has done a pretty good job putting this together i think the pcie layout could have been a little bit better but i really like the release button for the gpu that's really innovative especially if you change your gpu a lot or you need to pop things in and out of the system it's a great feature for somebody like me for you i don't know how often are you changing your gpu now for the return the mini game i was hinting about it did you figure out why it was returned well this motherboard out of the box had bios version 0407 bias version 407 i don't think was ever meant to see the light of day there weren't even any xmp options or docp options or anything to do with memory tuning basically it's a will it boot situation fortunately asus had some more up-to-date bios on their website in fact o407 is so old that it's not on the asus website how crazy is that maybe microcenter was expected to update these before selling them to customers i don't know but yeah i have a feeling that somebody bought this motherboard put their cpu in it maybe they were able to get some ddr5 ram and nothing because there was nothing wrong with the motherboard and i did not have to rma it but i did save a few bucks off the cost of the the motherboard because of the yellow tag from micro center in terms of other bios features you go through this it's a pretty standard asus bios everything is pretty much working as expected and alder like performance performance cores efficiency cores all that stuff is here if you disable your efficiency cores you do get avx 512 the instruction set if that's important to you mostly i'm going to say no unless you already you know are read in on those kind of things it doesn't really matter too much if you're trying to make a decision between an i5 i7 i9 there's no gaming performance difference not really between the i7 and the i9 so you can save a couple hundred bucks get the i7 really you only lose four efficiency cores and windows 11 goes out of its way to make sure that you're not using those efficiency cores for gaming anyway so really have you lost much the i5 is also a little bit bananas the 12 600k six performance cores and four efficiency cores 10 cores total 10 cores for an i5 that's that's crazy and also around 300 a little bit less a little bit more depending on where you are there's some other i5 cpus that are coming if they're not already out by the time this video is out that i'm going to take a look at but this motherboard might be overkill if you're going for something like an i5 the power delivery circuitry here is really designed for the i9 and even overclocking now in terms of linux support linux support is actually really weird right now so these alder lake cpus use an extension of turbo boost max 3.0 the way that was implemented in the linux kernel so there's bugs if you have an i5 because historically the i5 had not supported turbo boost max 3.0 you're going to have a bad time the asus bios actually does work with linux to do the scheduling hints correctly so there's a there's a structure that's in proc you can check out the level one forum you can come there there's a couple threads that describe this but in a nutshell if you disable xmp this motherboard will correctly report the hints that are necessary for the scheduler in linux to make decisions about scheduling on pcor's e-cores and hyper-threaded cores if you enable xmp at least as of the 1129 bios for this motherboard all of the cpus are treated equally including the hyper-threaded cores which seems like a mistake so linux on alder lake in general is a bit weird the i225v is reasonably well supported on linux sometimes you get an error like -19 because it has trouble loading the driver and that's a whole other dimension of crazy that you have to deal with but the supreme fx which is you know really a real tech chipset is pretty well supported on linux and all of the other onboard features for this motherboard pretty well supported in linux you can configure your fans through the bios so that you don't have to worry too much about that kind of thing in linux but for linux specific stuff you can check out the linux channel and we'll talk a little bit more about that overall it's a good motherboard asus is a pretty good brand they're they like to think they're the best uh it's a pretty well put together motherboard if you're doing a gaming build you really wouldn't go wrong picking this motherboard there's not really anything that dramatically sets it apart if anything for the standard issue price tag of 399 you might be able to get a little bit more features a little bit better deal but the motherboard is really well put together for what you get especially in terms of power delivery and the ddr5 memory aspect of it and overclocking if you're looking for the best bang for your buck i think ddr4 right now with a less expensive motherboard for alder lake with the i7 overall is the best bang for your buck but if you're looking for a higher end system with an i9 a ddr5 it's a pretty good choice immobile this is level one i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums\n"