The Z690 ORIS Master: A Comprehensive Review

When it comes to building a high-performance PC, the choice of motherboard is crucial. In this review, we'll take a closer look at the Z690 ORIS Master, a high-end motherboard that offers top-notch features and performance.

Personally, I don't think the extra cost of DDR5 is worth it right now. While the board itself is excellent, with features like a better cooling system, more fan connectors, and a higher-quality back plate, the price tag is too steep for what it provides. In contrast, the Gigabyte Gaming X version of this motherboard with DDR4 offers similar features at a lower cost.

To test the performance of the Z690 ORIS Master, we conducted extensive benchmarks and testing between DDR4 and DDR5. The results showed that while DDR5 has some advantages, they are not significant enough to justify the extra cost. In fact, a 32GB kit of DDR4 memory is often available for around $200, which is comparable to the price of a single 64GB kit of DDR5.

In terms of Linux support, the audio codec and NIC on this motherboard are well-supported, with no issues reported. However, the secondary and tertiary USB controllers can be a bit finicky, requiring careful configuration to get working properly. A little research and experimentation can go a long way in getting these components up and running smoothly.

One feature worth noting is the board's ability to report hints in the proc folder that allow the Linux scheduler to schedule tasks efficiently on the processor cores. This works beautifully with the i7 and i9 processors, but not with the i5, which seems to require XMP off to function correctly.

For those interested in building a PC with Linux, this motherboard is a great choice. The company's Linux channel provides plenty of valuable resources and information for users looking to get started with Linux on their PCs.

In terms of accessories, the board comes with everything needed out of the box, including the necessary screws, cable ties, and power cables. However, some might be surprised to find that all the accessories are actually mounted directly to the motherboard itself.

While DDR5 is not yet a viable option for most users, the Z690 ORIS Master is still an excellent choice for those who want a high-performance PC with top-notch features. With its excellent cooling system, more fan connectors, and higher-quality back plate, this board is sure to please even the most discerning enthusiasts.

As always, we encourage you to join us in the Level One forums or chat channel to share your thoughts and experiences with this motherboard. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, we'd love to hear from you!

In conclusion, while DDR5 may not be worth it for most users at present, the Z690 ORIS Master is an excellent choice for anyone looking to build a high-performance PC. With its impressive feature set and top-notch performance, this motherboard is sure to please even the most demanding enthusiasts.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin our continuing coverage of z690 we have the auras z690 master this is the master edition so this is ddr5 now i actually reviewed the gigabyte gaming x ddr4 it should look familiar it's almost an identical board layout except well this is the master there's a lot more stuff here than the ddr4 version you know spend more get more in this case get a lot more let's take a look this board oh it's all heatsink look at this look at this this m.2 heatsink i think takes the record for most metal in a single m.2 heatsink it's sort of weird it seems like it's a little more aesthetic than an actual fin stack but having this much thermal mass it's got to be good right we also have the second largest m.2 heatsink i've ever seen this whole thing which is for up to four m.2s this board will fit three 110 millimeter m.2s and two 80 millimeter m.2s 5m.2 goodness gracious of course it only has three pcie slots in order to be able to do that the primary pcie slot is pci express 5.0 by 16 to the alder lake lga 1700 socket and then the other two are wired in through the chipset both of the slots wired in through the chipset are pci express by four meaning four lanes wide so if you're using a you know like a buy eight you know maladoc's 100 gigabit card sorry it's only a by four connection it'll probably still work probably just be bottlenecked a little bit the other nice thing about this motherboard is it's a true vrm fin stack gigabyte did not skimp on the vrm cooling on this motherboard it is serious serious thermal pads a serious thermal interface and double thermal interfaces between the protective back plate on the motherboard which yes it does have a nice attractive back plate on the back of the motherboard but also the thermal interface for the areas that get hot it's gonna help dissipate some heat four pin fan headers nine nine four pin fan headers there's dual 8-pin cpu power connectors to the fan connectors are located there four along the top edge here one at the front middle edge of the board and three along the bottom edge of the motherboard that is ample headers if you want to get fancy in terms of front panel usb connections we've got two 30 pin fan headers and a type c header yes the type c header is 20 gigabit 20 gigabit so that's you know sort of dual 10 gig double sided 10 gig at the rear of the motherboard they've basically used the entire i o shield for usb this is just an absurd number of 5 and 10 gigabit usb ports including two type c ports both of which are 20 gig you might be thinking wait a minute isn't that more usb connectivity than even the ridiculous z690 chipset supports you would be correct gigabyte actually employs two hub chips in order to make all of the usb ports on this motherboard available they've also added an additional two usb 2 headers so that's four usb 2.0 ports that are available for other accessories or peripherals that you might run or you could break those out to you know a rear usb 2.0 io shield if you want because there are no usb 2.0 ports on the back of the motherboard it's all 5 and 10 and 20 gigabit the onboard nick hallelujah is 10 gigabit aquantia very nice 10 gigabit the marvel aqc 1113c that number sounds familiar you'd be correct you've seen it before the audio solution on this motherboard gold-plated 7.1 analog out also has optical spdif out that is of course implemented using the realtek 1220vb chipset along with an ess saber es91 dac so that's going to support you know dtsx ultra high definition audio and a lot of other really cool stuff on the audio side front panel audio of course you got the dac for driving you know higher end headphones you can sort of see them poking out the side of the heatsink there so no complaints about the audio solution the board does support bios flashback so that you can flash the bios from a usb stick because hey there's more alder lake skus that are coming out that are probably not supported in the shipping bioses for these which by the way this one came from micro center it shipped with the f4 bios i did all of my testing on the f6a bios the f6a bios was dramatically more bug free and a little bit faster new micro code from intel intel's tweaked some things you know done some stuff the special sauce definitely has a uh a heavy sodium aftertaste now whereas it didn't before but hey the performance is better so i can't really argue with that oh and before i forget there is a thunderbolt header thunderbolt works a little differently for thunderbolt 4 more control wires and control plane stuff but there is a header for that i haven't got my hands on a controller yet there's also six six gigabit per second sata port check the block diagram for any shared resources but yeah if you're still rocking sata devices you've got the sata option for this motherboard it also in the box comes with two thermal sensors that you can work into your fan profile which of course is handled directly by the motherboard which is nice if you're on alternative operating systems like linux or you don't want to load extra bloat on your windows installation there's also an acoustic sensor so you can actually install a microphone inside your computer to listen for noise that comes from the fans or other internal noise and use that to set up a profile and say hey try to keep the noise level below this and beyond that i don't care in terms of cooling which is sort of a nice touch you'd be surprised how many people use that it's not bad other nice features it has a diagnostic code readout and a power button physical power button in the top left corner of the board it's a nice touch it's pretty easy to do a build around this system it's pretty easy to do a build with this system you know just outside on the motherboard box because the i o shield will protect it from shorting out or anything like that overall it's a pretty solid board my opinion the vrm solution is a little overkill even for alder lake even the cooling and that sort of thing if you're gonna be doing extreme overclocking this is probably the board for you oh and it does have the new intel wi-fi 6e solution which is 802.11 ax but it's wi-fi 6c so it's got a little bit more extra special sauce it comes with a nice antenna setup as well one of the things i love about gigabot is they publish a block diagram in the manual showing you exactly what connects where and what shares resources so if you're planning a really monster system with dual pci express 4.0 cards or you're going to do something with alder lake raid definitely check out the motherboard manual for the block diagram to understand how everything connects now this is a z690 chipset normally on intel reviews the chipset connection is one of the things that i complain about i've been complaining about that since the skylake days alder lake no more this is pci express this is eight pci express 4.0 lanes of bandwidth from the cpu to the chipset eight pci express four lanes just for the chipset this is not something that's going to bottleneck because all of your secondary pci express lanes come off of the chipset most of the peripherals that connect to the the chipset are not going to be using that bandwidth all of the time anyway i'm a little surprised that on something as high end is the gigabyte master motherboard that it doesn't split out the pci express 5 slot so that you can have a buy 8x8 configuration you can of course get that on higher end boards but not on this board so if you're running to run you know two graphics cards or two really high speed peripherals um it's not going to do it i'm also surprised that there's not a motherboard on the market i know of that i know of yet that would take the pci express five lanes with the pci express 5 bridge and take those 16 lanes and turn it into 32 pci express 4 lanes that's an equivalent amount of bandwidth and that would let you run two pci express 4.0 by 16 pcie slots on a motherboard at full bandwidth plus all of the other pcie slots or other pcie connectivity that you could have through the chipset so yeah that's not a thing really anywhere so it's not really anything i can complain about just full disclosure very happy with the way that intel did the z690 chipset tons of bandwidth of course the primary m.2 slot that's also connected directly to the cpu that's not going through the chipset same as 11th gen that was that was a good improvement on the 11th gen well yeah 11th chan so uh nice job good job intel very nicely done if you wanted to run raid m.2 where you have one connected to the cpu and one connected through the chipset you totally can do it it's really easy to do we did a video on that with this board's uh younger sibling that uh was ddr4 so be sure to check that out this board says that it's rated for ddr5 4800 and i can confirm dr5 4800 worked just fine on this motherboard i managed to get my hands on some ddr5 5200 also working on this motherboard at least for me so your mileage may vary ddr5 has been weird have you noticed i've noticed that the qvl list for ddr5 memory they published some and then they took it down and then they put it back and then they took a lot of stuff off of it and they took it down again and they put it back and now there's only like two or three kits on the qualified vendor list ddr5 i think has some teething issues so just get the ddr4 board so we did a lot of benchmarks and testing between ddr4 and ddr5 this board with ddr5 it's a good board don't get me wrong personally i don't think that it's worth it going through a lot of headache and misery to get ddr5 when you could get the gigabyte gaming x version of this motherboard with ddr4 and basically be a feature parody i mean everything on this board is nicer the vr is nicer the cooling is nicer there's more fan connectors heck of a lot more fan connectors the fan layout on the gaming x is really a little bit dumb but this is much better cooling back plate higher in board all around more usb ports just 10 gigabit on board there's a lot of things to love about it but the price of admission for ddr5 is too high right now for what it gives you this is the i9 in here that i've been testing i've also tested the i9 and the ddr4 board with g skill tried in z cl 16 memory it's plenty fast enough you can get you know 1080p we're talking 220 225 fps in shadow of the tomb raider you know 1080p high and the memory makes more of a difference there than most other things and that's assuming that you were able to procure the highest end gpus you know a 6800 xt or 3080 or 3090 and if you're talking about a lesser gpu uh the differences basically aren't relevant but in most scenarios between ddr4 and ddr5 so in soapbox if you're curious about linux support well the audio codec and the nic those are both well supported on linux this is nothing new to linux there's nothing crazy going on here the extra usb ports are implemented with hubs as opposed to extra you know pcie controllers even though z690 has the lanes for that so it's a little less overall aggregate usb bandwidth i don't really see that as a bad thing because oh oh boy there's so much usb bandwidth here anyway it's just insane and that means that you're also not going to have any problems on linux with the secondary or tertiary usb controllers because those drivers can get a little sketchy in terms of overall alder lake linux support it can be a little hit and miss this is one of the few boards that actually correctly at least has f6a with xmp on correctly reports the uh hints in the proc folder that let the linux scheduler properly schedule things on the p cores first and then the e cores and then the hyper-threaded cores uh sometimes when you turn on xmp those all go to 255. that was true with the i7 and the i9 but not the i5 i'm not sure why that's not working with the i5 works fine with xmp off really squarely behavior no we're not not sure what's up with that i noticed on the other board that it worked fine at first but when i started playing musical chairs with cpus and clearing the bios it seemed like it didn't really 100 clear the bios i don't know what that's about but you can hardcore clear the bios pop the battery hold the button down you know really clear it go in there do your settings try it with xmp off first if you're going to run linux check those folders in proc make sure that's working correctly then you're good to go that's really the only usage notes that you need on linux if you're more interested in linux content we have a linux channel you can get subscribed to that's all really good that has been a relatively quick look at the z690 oris master it's a really high board i'm a little surprised that there's not more accessories in the box but all the accessories are actually mounted to the board no complaints ddr5 right now is not a good value in my opinion but this is a solid board if you're going to build it completely nuts you know ddr5 solution and you're gonna go with ddr5 memory and you don't care or you might be watching this in the future when ddr5 is generally available but right now when 32 gigs of ddr4 is like a couple of hundred bucks it's hard for me to recommend ddr5 especially if you can get really fast ddr4 for maybe another 50 or 100 dollars i mean that's gonna give ddr5 a run for its money if you've got good fast ddr4 i don't know i'm wendell this is level one you wanna argue with me about all this you can find me in the level one forums or just hang out you can hang out chat take pictures of your build i'm good with that i'm signing out you can find me there youin our continuing coverage of z690 we have the auras z690 master this is the master edition so this is ddr5 now i actually reviewed the gigabyte gaming x ddr4 it should look familiar it's almost an identical board layout except well this is the master there's a lot more stuff here than the ddr4 version you know spend more get more in this case get a lot more let's take a look this board oh it's all heatsink look at this look at this this m.2 heatsink i think takes the record for most metal in a single m.2 heatsink it's sort of weird it seems like it's a little more aesthetic than an actual fin stack but having this much thermal mass it's got to be good right we also have the second largest m.2 heatsink i've ever seen this whole thing which is for up to four m.2s this board will fit three 110 millimeter m.2s and two 80 millimeter m.2s 5m.2 goodness gracious of course it only has three pcie slots in order to be able to do that the primary pcie slot is pci express 5.0 by 16 to the alder lake lga 1700 socket and then the other two are wired in through the chipset both of the slots wired in through the chipset are pci express by four meaning four lanes wide so if you're using a you know like a buy eight you know maladoc's 100 gigabit card sorry it's only a by four connection it'll probably still work probably just be bottlenecked a little bit the other nice thing about this motherboard is it's a true vrm fin stack gigabyte did not skimp on the vrm cooling on this motherboard it is serious serious thermal pads a serious thermal interface and double thermal interfaces between the protective back plate on the motherboard which yes it does have a nice attractive back plate on the back of the motherboard but also the thermal interface for the areas that get hot it's gonna help dissipate some heat four pin fan headers nine nine four pin fan headers there's dual 8-pin cpu power connectors to the fan connectors are located there four along the top edge here one at the front middle edge of the board and three along the bottom edge of the motherboard that is ample headers if you want to get fancy in terms of front panel usb connections we've got two 30 pin fan headers and a type c header yes the type c header is 20 gigabit 20 gigabit so that's you know sort of dual 10 gig double sided 10 gig at the rear of the motherboard they've basically used the entire i o shield for usb this is just an absurd number of 5 and 10 gigabit usb ports including two type c ports both of which are 20 gig you might be thinking wait a minute isn't that more usb connectivity than even the ridiculous z690 chipset supports you would be correct gigabyte actually employs two hub chips in order to make all of the usb ports on this motherboard available they've also added an additional two usb 2 headers so that's four usb 2.0 ports that are available for other accessories or peripherals that you might run or you could break those out to you know a rear usb 2.0 io shield if you want because there are no usb 2.0 ports on the back of the motherboard it's all 5 and 10 and 20 gigabit the onboard nick hallelujah is 10 gigabit aquantia very nice 10 gigabit the marvel aqc 1113c that number sounds familiar you'd be correct you've seen it before the audio solution on this motherboard gold-plated 7.1 analog out also has optical spdif out that is of course implemented using the realtek 1220vb chipset along with an ess saber es91 dac so that's going to support you know dtsx ultra high definition audio and a lot of other really cool stuff on the audio side front panel audio of course you got the dac for driving you know higher end headphones you can sort of see them poking out the side of the heatsink there so no complaints about the audio solution the board does support bios flashback so that you can flash the bios from a usb stick because hey there's more alder lake skus that are coming out that are probably not supported in the shipping bioses for these which by the way this one came from micro center it shipped with the f4 bios i did all of my testing on the f6a bios the f6a bios was dramatically more bug free and a little bit faster new micro code from intel intel's tweaked some things you know done some stuff the special sauce definitely has a uh a heavy sodium aftertaste now whereas it didn't before but hey the performance is better so i can't really argue with that oh and before i forget there is a thunderbolt header thunderbolt works a little differently for thunderbolt 4 more control wires and control plane stuff but there is a header for that i haven't got my hands on a controller yet there's also six six gigabit per second sata port check the block diagram for any shared resources but yeah if you're still rocking sata devices you've got the sata option for this motherboard it also in the box comes with two thermal sensors that you can work into your fan profile which of course is handled directly by the motherboard which is nice if you're on alternative operating systems like linux or you don't want to load extra bloat on your windows installation there's also an acoustic sensor so you can actually install a microphone inside your computer to listen for noise that comes from the fans or other internal noise and use that to set up a profile and say hey try to keep the noise level below this and beyond that i don't care in terms of cooling which is sort of a nice touch you'd be surprised how many people use that it's not bad other nice features it has a diagnostic code readout and a power button physical power button in the top left corner of the board it's a nice touch it's pretty easy to do a build around this system it's pretty easy to do a build with this system you know just outside on the motherboard box because the i o shield will protect it from shorting out or anything like that overall it's a pretty solid board my opinion the vrm solution is a little overkill even for alder lake even the cooling and that sort of thing if you're gonna be doing extreme overclocking this is probably the board for you oh and it does have the new intel wi-fi 6e solution which is 802.11 ax but it's wi-fi 6c so it's got a little bit more extra special sauce it comes with a nice antenna setup as well one of the things i love about gigabot is they publish a block diagram in the manual showing you exactly what connects where and what shares resources so if you're planning a really monster system with dual pci express 4.0 cards or you're going to do something with alder lake raid definitely check out the motherboard manual for the block diagram to understand how everything connects now this is a z690 chipset normally on intel reviews the chipset connection is one of the things that i complain about i've been complaining about that since the skylake days alder lake no more this is pci express this is eight pci express 4.0 lanes of bandwidth from the cpu to the chipset eight pci express four lanes just for the chipset this is not something that's going to bottleneck because all of your secondary pci express lanes come off of the chipset most of the peripherals that connect to the the chipset are not going to be using that bandwidth all of the time anyway i'm a little surprised that on something as high end is the gigabyte master motherboard that it doesn't split out the pci express 5 slot so that you can have a buy 8x8 configuration you can of course get that on higher end boards but not on this board so if you're running to run you know two graphics cards or two really high speed peripherals um it's not going to do it i'm also surprised that there's not a motherboard on the market i know of that i know of yet that would take the pci express five lanes with the pci express 5 bridge and take those 16 lanes and turn it into 32 pci express 4 lanes that's an equivalent amount of bandwidth and that would let you run two pci express 4.0 by 16 pcie slots on a motherboard at full bandwidth plus all of the other pcie slots or other pcie connectivity that you could have through the chipset so yeah that's not a thing really anywhere so it's not really anything i can complain about just full disclosure very happy with the way that intel did the z690 chipset tons of bandwidth of course the primary m.2 slot that's also connected directly to the cpu that's not going through the chipset same as 11th gen that was that was a good improvement on the 11th gen well yeah 11th chan so uh nice job good job intel very nicely done if you wanted to run raid m.2 where you have one connected to the cpu and one connected through the chipset you totally can do it it's really easy to do we did a video on that with this board's uh younger sibling that uh was ddr4 so be sure to check that out this board says that it's rated for ddr5 4800 and i can confirm dr5 4800 worked just fine on this motherboard i managed to get my hands on some ddr5 5200 also working on this motherboard at least for me so your mileage may vary ddr5 has been weird have you noticed i've noticed that the qvl list for ddr5 memory they published some and then they took it down and then they put it back and then they took a lot of stuff off of it and they took it down again and they put it back and now there's only like two or three kits on the qualified vendor list ddr5 i think has some teething issues so just get the ddr4 board so we did a lot of benchmarks and testing between ddr4 and ddr5 this board with ddr5 it's a good board don't get me wrong personally i don't think that it's worth it going through a lot of headache and misery to get ddr5 when you could get the gigabyte gaming x version of this motherboard with ddr4 and basically be a feature parody i mean everything on this board is nicer the vr is nicer the cooling is nicer there's more fan connectors heck of a lot more fan connectors the fan layout on the gaming x is really a little bit dumb but this is much better cooling back plate higher in board all around more usb ports just 10 gigabit on board there's a lot of things to love about it but the price of admission for ddr5 is too high right now for what it gives you this is the i9 in here that i've been testing i've also tested the i9 and the ddr4 board with g skill tried in z cl 16 memory it's plenty fast enough you can get you know 1080p we're talking 220 225 fps in shadow of the tomb raider you know 1080p high and the memory makes more of a difference there than most other things and that's assuming that you were able to procure the highest end gpus you know a 6800 xt or 3080 or 3090 and if you're talking about a lesser gpu uh the differences basically aren't relevant but in most scenarios between ddr4 and ddr5 so in soapbox if you're curious about linux support well the audio codec and the nic those are both well supported on linux this is nothing new to linux there's nothing crazy going on here the extra usb ports are implemented with hubs as opposed to extra you know pcie controllers even though z690 has the lanes for that so it's a little less overall aggregate usb bandwidth i don't really see that as a bad thing because oh oh boy there's so much usb bandwidth here anyway it's just insane and that means that you're also not going to have any problems on linux with the secondary or tertiary usb controllers because those drivers can get a little sketchy in terms of overall alder lake linux support it can be a little hit and miss this is one of the few boards that actually correctly at least has f6a with xmp on correctly reports the uh hints in the proc folder that let the linux scheduler properly schedule things on the p cores first and then the e cores and then the hyper-threaded cores uh sometimes when you turn on xmp those all go to 255. that was true with the i7 and the i9 but not the i5 i'm not sure why that's not working with the i5 works fine with xmp off really squarely behavior no we're not not sure what's up with that i noticed on the other board that it worked fine at first but when i started playing musical chairs with cpus and clearing the bios it seemed like it didn't really 100 clear the bios i don't know what that's about but you can hardcore clear the bios pop the battery hold the button down you know really clear it go in there do your settings try it with xmp off first if you're going to run linux check those folders in proc make sure that's working correctly then you're good to go that's really the only usage notes that you need on linux if you're more interested in linux content we have a linux channel you can get subscribed to that's all really good that has been a relatively quick look at the z690 oris master it's a really high board i'm a little surprised that there's not more accessories in the box but all the accessories are actually mounted to the board no complaints ddr5 right now is not a good value in my opinion but this is a solid board if you're going to build it completely nuts you know ddr5 solution and you're gonna go with ddr5 memory and you don't care or you might be watching this in the future when ddr5 is generally available but right now when 32 gigs of ddr4 is like a couple of hundred bucks it's hard for me to recommend ddr5 especially if you can get really fast ddr4 for maybe another 50 or 100 dollars i mean that's gonna give ddr5 a run for its money if you've got good fast ddr4 i don't know i'm wendell this is level one you wanna argue with me about all this you can find me in the level one forums or just hang out you can hang out chat take pictures of your build i'm good with that i'm signing out you can find me there you\n"