ASUS ROG STRIX Z790-A Gaming WIFI D4 Review

A Closer Look

ASUS has put the bulk of the materials on this motherboard into the VRM heatsinks, which are pretty significant, and with a 16+1 Power Phase design, you should be able to run a high-end CPU pretty hard for long periods of time without ever having to worry about thermal throttling, but of course, we’ll be testing the VRM temperatures shortly too anyway.

The configuration looks robust and features high-quality alloy chokes, as well as durable capacitors, but let’s be honest, that’s pretty much a given on a brand name board these days, but still always reassuring to see, of course.

The VRM heatsink also expands to form a rear I/O shroud, keeping things looking smart, and there’s a mixture of silver and white, but mostly silver on the motherboard, an RGB lit section (the darker grey bits) and even a sneaky little PacMan in there too.

The CPU is fed by two 8-pin ProCool II reinforced power connectors.

There are four DIMM slots on this motherboard, which will support DDR4 5333 Mt/s (OC) memory, so while not the high-end newer DDR5 memory, at least you can likely use your existing memory kit if upgrading your current motherboard.

Q-release, always welcome to see this, just push the button here to remove the graphics card from the PCIe slot; no more trying to reach that little level with a pencil.

There’s plenty of armour down here, providing heatsinks for the M.2 mounts, as well as a small chipset heatsink on the right too. They’re all separate panels though, rather than forming one overall larger heatsink.

Below it, you’ll find a plethora of M.2 mounts, with room for 2 x M.2 22110 and 2 x M.2 2280 size drives, all of which are PCIe 4.0 x4 compatible. There’s a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, 2 x PCIe 4.0 x16 and 1 x PCIe 3.0 x2 slots too.

The rear I/O is very well equipped too, with both HDMI and Display Port, as well as two Type-C ports, one of which is 10Gbps the other is 20Gbps. Interestingly there’s another little PacMan graphic here, and I can’t help but wonder if this is licenced or not, as it’s not like they’re pushing the Namco branding anyway… shhh.