How Much Does It Cost?
The ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Extreme is extremely expensive, and if you want one, it’s a wallet bursting £1,188.99 directly from ASUS. That’s crazy money, far beyond the reach of almost all gamers and consumers. But then again, if you’re needing the latest technology like Thunderbolt USB 4, USB 32. Gen 2×2 Type-C, two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, and 10 GbE LAN, then this is where you’ll find it all. But as I said, unless you seriously plan on actually using all of those, they’re just huge investments your flushing down the toilet.
Overview
You could use this for gaming, but why bother when an ASUS ROG STRIX Gaming is a fraction of the price and gives you a higher frame rate? This motherboard is built for usage levels that we didn’t even test it to. Dual PCIe 5.0 slots mean you can add dual workstation GPUs for some seriously punchy rendering performance. Or you could add PCIe 5.0 RAID cards with a plethora of the latest NVMe drives for gigabits per second storage options. That’s what the EXTREME is for.
What’s interesting is that its performance was largely average. It’s not built for speed as you might expect, at least, not at stock settings. It’s built for around-the-clock reliability and stability, and it certainly delivers in that regard. The cooling performance on the M.2 bays, the VRM, and any other hardware for that matter is seriously impressive. Thermal throttling just isn’t going to be an issue here, even after hours, if not days, or intensive loads.
I can see this being a good motherboard for places that do intensive CGI rendering and movie production as it has some incredible I/O that will benefit the moving and loading of huge assets from multiple internal and external sources. We typically use multiple Type-C NVMe drives on our recording equipment, and that all needs to be synced at the end of a shoot. Plus, with 10 GbE and 2.5 GbE LAN, you can have an internal and external network option to connect to 10 GbE network storage too, which is awesome, if you have it. Even the on-board audio is insanely good.
Should I Buy One?
No, most likely not, and frankly, I feel I wasted my time testing it to some degree. It’s not really about being the fastest, but about being a Swiss army knife of a motherboard. If you need all the best features and connectivity currently available, they’re pretty much all here. But unless you’re really going to use both PCIe 5.0 slots, all the networking options, and all the super-fast USB stuff, it’s a wasted investment. But while it’s not the fastest, the relentlessly over-engineered build quality and cooling means it’s likely to be one of the most reliable motherboards ever when put under intense loads, and that’s going to pay off big time for any serious production work.
