ASUS ROG STRIX Z790-A Gaming WIFI D4 Review

How Much Does It Cost?

The ROG STRIX Z790-A GAMING WIFI D4 is a mid-to-high-end board, with much of your investment going towards the competent VRM configuration and all those big aluminium heatsinks. However, they’ve balanced that by using DDR4 memory slots, and there are no PCIe Gen 5 M.2 slots, but the end result keeps the board MSRP down to £399.99, but at the time of writing, it was a much better £319.98 on Amazon, and even ASUS sell it directly for just £327.77 too.

Overview

The ASUS ROG STRIX Z790-A GAMING WIFI D4 is an interesting motherboard and looks like a great option for those upgrading a motherboard from the last couple of years. With PCIe Gen 4 support on the M.2 slots, and DDR4 memory, as well as 12th and 13th Gen Intel CPU supports, you can likely bring a lot of your old storage, memory and for some, even the CPU forward when you upgrade or replace your existing motherboard.

However, even if you’re building a new system, it has a lot to offer, and mostly that CPU VRM configuration, which is pretty high-end and no doubt a large contributor to the overall retail price of this motherboard. It’s quite a nice looking motherboard too, with larger heatsinks, and while I thought it was a white motherboard, getting hands-on with it, it’s largely black/dark grey with a lot of silver and aluminium finishes that give it a nice monochrome look that should blend in well with darker or lighter coloured PC cases equally well.

Connectivity is very good, with plenty of USB ports, including Type-C and even a super-fast 20 Gbps port. There’s both WiFi 6E as well as 2.5 GbE LAN, so networking and other connected storage devices should all benefit greatly.

Should I Buy One?

I’m a little torn, as there’s nothing inherently wrong with this motherboard, but if you really get down to it, it’s clearly built for a specific part of the market that is still holding onto both DDR4 and isn’t fussed about the newer PCIe Gen 5 M.2, but for many PC gamers and users, skipping the newer add-on technologies isn’t a deal breaker, but there are certainly benefit to it if you can afford to upgrade other components of your build too. Either way, it looks great, it’s well made, the performance is right where we expected, and if you’re lucky, there does seem to be about £80 off the retail price right now.