A Closer Look
This is a great-looking motherboard, and it’s also nice and light-coloured. A lot of high-end motherboards tend to get darker the higher up the range you go. However, the Prime series has long been a user of white, grey and silver in its designs, and I think it looks pretty fantastic. This would look nice in a white PC case, but even in a darker colour, it’s going to go give you a nice contrast. The VRM heatsinks are significant too, some of the largest out there actually, and that bodes well for the overall CPU performance.
It uses a 16+1 Teamed Power Stage design with 60A chokes, and with those heatsinks, you should be able to hit the CPU pretty hard for long periods, which is awesome.
The left heatsinks actually gets an extension too, with it forming a cover for the rear I/O guard, and there’s a funky window on it too, which is… interesting to say the least.
Strip everything away and it’s clear that ASUS has put a lot of hardware on this board. There are high-quality capacitors and chokes on the VRM, with a pair of 8-pin CPU headers to feed all the extra voltage and power stability you need for bigger overclocking and boost performance.
The primary expansion slot is an x16 PCI 5.0, so it’ll handle the latest and greatest devices, but it’s also heavily armoured, so it’ll sustain the weight of the monster GPUs that are hitting the market. There’s also a pair of PCIe 1x and a 4x slot below it.
There’s an x16 slot down at the bottom too, and with all the heatsinks removed, we can see there are four M.2 mounts here too, giving you plenty of expansion options. There’s also a lever coming off the primary PCIe slot, allowing you to easily remove GPUs without having to cram your fingers behind it.
Behind the motherboard, there’s not a whole log going on, but you can see where the trace splits to isolate the audio hardware.
The rear I/O is nice and clean and offers up both HDMI and DisplayPort. There are no USB 2 ports, instead, you get four USB 3, two USB 3.2 Gen2 10Gbps Type-A, and two Type-C, one is 20 Gbps the other 10Gbps.
