ASUS ROG STRIX Z790-A Gaming-WiFi II Motherboard Review

ASUS has always carried itself as a premium brand, something that's often reflected in its higher prices, especially on its RoG series of hardware. However, while ASUS has had a few hiccups in the tech market this year (and let's be impartial here, so have all the other brands from time to time), one area they usually get it all right has to be motherboards. At a little under £500, the ASUS ROG STRIX Z790-A Gaming-WiFi II is far from their most expensive, but it most certainly isn't affordable either, so you would expect a lot of features and good performance for your money. On the features side, it seems to hold up, and of course, we'll get to the performance shortly. Z790 Aorus Pro X It supports many of the latest technologies, such as the blisteringly fast WiFi 7, and the fastest 2.5 GbE LAN port. There's also some fastest USB Type-C 20 Gbps front and back, PCIe 5.0 x16, and PCIe 4.0 for storage. The keen-eyed among you will realise that's not the fastest stuff on the market though, with some rivals having 5 or 10 GbE LAN, 40 Gbps Type-C and there's no Gen 5 M.2 here either, which is a shame. However, let's get on and take a closer look and then see how its performance compares to the competition. Z790 Aorus Pro X Features For in-depth features and specifications, please visit the official product page here. What ASUS RoG Had to Say The ROG Strix Z790-A II boldly embraces the light, for an alternate take on build themes to its dark and brooding brother, the Strix Z790-F. Silver metallic heatsinks pop against a dark PCB backdrop and call attention to the board's high capacity for thermal management. A transparent layer on the I/O shield adds a unique touch and emphasizes the customizable RGB logo below. The whole design is tied together with ROG-centric detailing on the board, heatsinks, and I/O shield for a vibrant and futuristic outlook. Pair the Strix Z790-A II with other products from the diverse ROG ecosystem to create a fully-customized gaming setup that reflects your personal style. A Closer Look Well, as usual, ASUS has got the aesthetics just right on this one. For this price range, we do usually see a more full-armour aesthetic on the lower half, but I like that it's built into zones with heatsinks for all the major components, making it feel very modular. The CPU is flanked by two significantly sized heatsinks, with deep fins cut into the brushed aluminium, and they provide a striking contrast against the black PCB too. There's a heatsink for the top M.2 socket, and to the right of that the Q-Release button for the primary PCIe 5.0 slot. Below that, there's the main chipset heatsink, and then two further heatsinks below that for the additional M.2 slots, with two screws holding each in place for reasonably easy access. The motherboard uses the same high-quality black capacitors throughout its design too, which is always good to see. There are two CPU power connectors, and with their reinforced ProCool II design, they can handle higher power and maintain lower temperatures. There are four DIMM slots, supporting up to 192GB DDR5 up to 8000 MHz (OC). The board supports 4 SATA devices, fewer than previous generations, but the market has steadily shifted to M.2 and there's plenty of those. There's a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot at the top, which is heavily reinforced to deal with bulky GPUs, a single PCIe 4.0 X16 sized slot wired as X4, and a PCIe 3.0 x1 Slot. There's also some nice audio hardware with the ROG SupremeFX 5.1 Surround Sound High Definition Audio CODEC using the ALC4080 chipset and Savitech SV3H712 AMP. At the back, there's not a lot going on here, just a bit of a digital graphic. The rear I/O is pretty packed, with a plethora of USB Type-A ports, there are four USB 2, four USB 5Gbps, two 10Gbps, as well as USB Type-C 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps. You also get both HDMI and DisplayPort, WiFi 7, 2.5 Gbps LAN and audio outputs. Some rival products do have 5 to 10 Gbps LAN and there's no 40 Gbps Type-C, but really, not many people actually need those. With the armour stripped away, we can see there's a pretty robust-looking VRM configuration on the top half, as well as lots of M.2 mounts on the lower half. It utilises a 16+1+2 Power Stage design with 70A MOSFETS, and when combined with those massive heatsinks, this board shouldn't have any issues with power delivery to the CPU. There's a full-size PCIe 4.0 M.2 above the primary PCIe 5.0 lane and four more PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots on the lower section of the motherboard. With the addition of four SATA ports, you're unlikely to be lacking storage space here. Finally, we see the rear of the heatsinks, which come with a good quality thermal compound on both, although I would have liked to see a heatpipe to bridge the two sections. How We Test We continue to update our testing methods around once per year. As such, we re-test older hardware to reflect changes over time. These can be driver updates, Windows updates, game patches, and more; all of which have an impact on performance figures. Furthermore, we update our test benches to newer and more relevant hardware. This means that our new reviews aren’t always comparable to those of older reviews, so please compare the testing methodology on older reviews should you be trying to compare them with newer ones. Replicate Our Results When it comes to our benchmarks in our reviews, the benchmarks are pretty self-explanatory and are kept as simple as possible, although there are a few exceptions. Remember that your choice of a graphics card, CPU, the silicon lottery, and other factors can yield different numbers, and there’s always a margin for error when using any software. Links are provided below, as well as the settings we use. We encourage you to not just look at how one product compares to any other, but how it compares to your own. If you’re looking to build a new system, you should benchmark your current PC using the benchmarks available to you. You should then look at the percentage improvement from your current hardware to the hardware tested here to give you a ballpark figure of how much of an upgrade this will provide you with. Motherboard Test Systems Test System (AM5) Motherboard Changes Per Review Review Buy Now Processor AMD Ryzen 9 7900X GPU Zotac RTX 3090 Trinity Review Buy Now RAM Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR5 32GB 5200MHz Review Buy Now CPU Cooler NZXT Kraken Z73 RGB Buy Now Power Supply NZXT C1000 Gold Review Buy Now Storage Seagate FIRECUDA 530 1TB Review Buy Now Chassis NZXT H7 Flow Review Buy Now OS Windows 11 Pro Version 21H2 Drivers Graphics: 516.94 Test System (AM4) Motherboard Changes Per Review Buy Now Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5950X GPU Zotac RTX 3090 Trinity Review Buy Now RAM Kingston Fury Renegade DDR4 32GB 3600MHz Review Buy Now CPU Cooler NZXT Kraken Z73 RGB Buy Now Power Supply NZXT C1000 Gold Review Buy Now Storage Seagate FIRECUDA 530 1TB Review Buy Now Chassis NZXT H7 Flow Review Buy Now OS Windows 11 Pro Version 21H2 Drivers Graphics: 516.94 Test System (Z690) Motherboard Changes Per Review Review Buy Now Processor Intel Core i9 12900K GPU Zotac RTX 3090 Trinity Review Buy Now RAM Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR5 32GB 5200MHz Review Buy Now CPU Cooler NZXT Kraken Z73 RGB Buy Now Power Supply NZXT C1000 Gold Review Buy Now Storage Seagate FIRECUDA 530 1TB Review Buy Now Chassis NZXT H7 Flow Review Buy Now OS Windows 11 Pro Version 21H2 Drivers Graphics: 516.94 Test System (Z590) Motherboard Changes Per Review Review Buy Now Processor Intel Core i9 11900K GPU Zotac RTX 3090 Trinity Review Buy Now RAM Kingston Fury Renegade DDR4 32GB 3600MHz Review Buy Now CPU Cooler NZXT Kraken Z73 RGB Buy Now Power Supply NZXT C1000 Gold Review Buy Now Storage Seagate FIRECUDA 530 1TB Review Buy Now Chassis NZXT H7 Flow Review Buy Now OS Windows 11 Pro Version 21H2 Drivers Graphics: 516.94 Additional Hardware ElmorLabs PMD-USB Power Measurement Device With USB (link) Software We use a variety of software from different developers to assist in our testing and to give us the most consistent results possible. Some applications are specifically used for testing, while others are simply used for monitoring and to aid us in making sure that our results are as accurate as possible. Software Used 3DMark FireStrike & TimeSpy (download) AIDA64 (download) CapFrameX 1.6.9 (download) Cinebench R23 (download) CPU-Z (download) HWMonitor (download) PCMark 10 Express (download) Super PI 2.1 WP (download) Gaming To gauge performance levels which are easily reproduced time after time, by both ourselves and our readers, we now stick strictly to games' default profiles. Given how powerful most modern cards are getting, we've begun using more demanding profiles for most games, but will otherwise state on a per-game basis if we use other profiles beyond High, Ultra, Maximum or their respective equivalent at all resolutions. V-Sync is always disabled in our testing, and all FPS caps that can be removed are. We also enable XMP and Resizable bar technology across all platforms to keep things as fair as possible. Games While we test a lot of games, it's not possible to display all of the data on the website or in our videos. Instead, we include access to all of our testing data for our Patreon members (link), where members get a ton of other benefits as well. What we do, however, is display charts for averages across all game titles to give a better picture of performance across all titles tested. Cyberpunk 2077 Horizon Zero Dawn Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Resolutions 1080p (Full HD) Some tests will also include features such as NVIDIA DLSS and Ray Tracing. However, these will be clearly labelled and may only appear in reviews for graphics cards that support those features. Power Consumption Not being content on simply reading total system power draw at both idle, we now have the ability thanks to the ElmorLabs PMD-USB device that allows us to measure power draw directly through the EPS power connectors. We test at idle, during gaming load, of which we measure drawing a run of Cyberpunk 2077 and during Cinebench R23 at load too. We also use a GW-Instek GPM-8212 power meter to measure the complete system power at the wall to get an idea of how each motherboard compares to one another. VRM Temperatures We take temperature readings after 10 minutes of desktop idle with no background programs running, then take the recorded maximum delivered during the same runs as when we measure power consumption, being during our Cyberpunk 2033 run, and during Cinebench R23 at load too. 3DMark Timespy Extreme Time Spy Extreme is a new 4K DirectX 12 benchmark test, available in 3DMark Advanced and Professional Editions. You don’t need a 4K monitor to run it, but you will need a GPU with at least 4 GB of dedicated memory. With its 4K Ultra HD rendering resolution, Time Spy Extreme is an ideal benchmark test for the latest high-end graphics cards. The CPU test has been redesigned to let processors with 8 or more cores perform to their full potential 3DMark is available on Steam here. Performance is clearly excellent here, with a strong score of 8938 points, not to be mixed up with the even faster Z790-E Gaming which is in second place. PCMark 10 Express PCMark 10 features a comprehensive set of tests that cover the wide variety of tasks performed in the modern workplace. With a range of performance tests, custom run options, Battery Life Profile, and new Storage benchmarks, PCMark 10 is the complete PC benchmark for the modern office. Available now on Steam. Falling a bit behind here, with 5736 points, so some room for improvement here. Super PI 2.1 WP Super PI is a single-threaded benchmark that calculates pi to a specific number of digits. It uses the Gauss-Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of a program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute pi to 232 digits Available now on Super PI. A pretty good score here, hitting 373.573 seconds, broadly on par with the TUF Gaming and the Aorus Pro X. Cinebench R23 Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s hardware capabilities. Improvements to Cinebench Release 23 reflect the overall advancements to CPU and rendering technology in recent years, providing a more accurate measurement of Cinema 4D’s ability to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and modern processor features available to the average user. Best of all: It’s free. Available now on Maxon. A really good score here, with 25960 on the multi-core, and a good single-core score of 1915 putting it firmly into the high-end bracket. AIDA64 AIDA64 is a system information, diagnostics, and auditing application developed by FinalWire Ltd that runs on Windows, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Tizen, Chrome OS and Sailfish OS operating systems. It displays detailed information on the components of a computer. Available now on AIDA64. The memory performance is superb too, with some of the fastest read, write and copy speeds yet, and while the latency is a little higher, it's within the range of what we expected to see. Cyberpunk 2077 Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world, action-adventure RPG set in the megalopolis of Night City, where you play as a cyberpunk mercenary wrapped up in a do-or-die fight for survival. Improved and featuring all-new free additional content, customize your character and playstyle as you take on jobs, build a reputation, and unlock upgrades. The relationships you forge and the choices you make will shape the story and the world around you. Legends are made here. What will yours be? Available now on Steam. So we move on to gaming, and this is turning out to be a very easy review to write, as it's simply the fastest motherboard for this game by a significant margin. Horizon Zero Dawn Experience Aloy’s entire legendary quest to unravel the mysteries of a world ruled by deadly Machines. An outcast from her tribe, the young hunter fights to uncover her past, discover her destiny… and stop a catastrophic threat to the future. Unleash devastating, tactical attacks against unique Machines and rival tribes as you explore an open world teeming with wildlife and danger. Horizon Zero Dawn is a multi-award-winning action role-playing game – and this Complete Edition for PC includes the huge expansion The Frozen Wilds, featuring new lands, skills, weapons and Machines. Available now on Steam. Not the fastest here, but again, third place is still a pretty damn good place to be and the 1% lows are extremely high at 140 FPS. Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered Developed by Insomniac Games in collaboration with Marvel, and optimized for PC by Nixxes Software, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on PC introduces an experienced Peter Parker who’s fighting big crime and iconic villains in Marvel’s New York. At the same time, he’s struggling to balance his chaotic personal life and career while the fate of Marvel’s New York rests upon his shoulders. Available now on Steam. ASUS leading the pack here too, with both the Z790-E and Z790-A scoring very similarly at the top of the chart. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 The Microsoft Flight Simulator Game of the Year (GOTY) Edition celebrates all the positive feedback, reviews and awards garnered, but it is also a “Thank You” to our fans – new and old – that have made Microsoft Flight Simulator such a phenomenon. Best of all, the Microsoft Flight Simulator Game of the Year Edition will be available as a free update for existing players on PC. Available now on Steam. This is the game that often trips up most motherboard, but again, it's on par with the high-end stuff, hitting 61 FPS 1% lows and 80 FPS average, which I'm more than happy with. Boot Time The boot times are quite long on this board, so enough time to grab a snack on a cold boot, which is shame. The other key areas that are worth focussing on though comes down to VRM temperatures, which can differ wildly depending on the amount, the capacity of the current that can pass through them, and of course how the various heatsinks handle that power, which in turn, creates heat. VRM Temperatures The VRM configuration on this motherboard is pretty fantastic, but as big as the heatsinks look, they don't have as much metal as some of the competition and there's no heatpipe bridging the two, so the top line did give us a higher peak temperature that the left side, hitting 57.6c. However, is that a temperature to be concerned about? Absolutely not, this motherboard does a great job here. Power Consumption Power usage is alright, hitting 370 watts, it's broadly on par with the competition, but with such good CPU performance, I'm happy with where it is at. How Much Does It Cost? The Asus ROG Strix Z790-A Gaming WIFI II (LGA 1700) DDR5 ATX Motherboard is a bit on the expensive side, with an MSRP of £474.98 but currently £446.99 at the time of writing, it's about £50 more than most rivals, but that's been true for ASUS products since the dawn of time, so no surprise there. I also think for the money, it's a little lacking in connectivity, with rivals having faster LAN and Gen5 M.2 mounts, but honestly, if you don't need those, it's no big deal, and this board more than makes up for its shortfalls with its raw CPU performance. Overview When it comes to getting great performance from your CPU or GPU, or ya know, both of them simultaneously, the Asus ROG Strix Z790-A Gaming WIFI II is pretty fantastic. It's going to make a great motherboard for gamers and content creators, or more specifically gamers who create content. It's a fast gaming motherboard, delivering high FPS and strong 1% lows throughout our testing, and with five M.2 storage mounts and four SATA ports, getting huge amounts of storage installed, with varying RAID configurations, it's going to more than makes up for its lack of Gen 5 M.2 mounts. For rendering, it delivered really good single and multi-core performance from our CPU, and the robust VRM configuration is more than capable of maintaining high boost clocks for extended periods. There's room to have an even better VRM cooler, as it did get warmer than some, but still far from anything I'd be worried about, and that would have only increased the price further, so it's walking a nice sweet spot in that regard. There's a good range of heatsinks on all the storage bays too, which I like, and since they're modular in design, you can use some onboard heatsinks or take them off and use aftermarket solutions to suit your needs too. I like the PCIe 5.0 slot design, it's very robust and should deal with larger graphics cards easily, and it even has a quick-release button too, which is always great to see. There's a 1x and a 16x (wired as 4x) PCIe slot too, so adding in something like an I/O card or capture card is easy enough, but if you need more PCIe slots, you'll likely want a higher-end model. However, for a modern gaming PC with one GPU, this is more than enough for most. Should I Buy One? This is a well-rounded motherboard, and while it could be improved with faster connectivity and even a Gen5 M.2, it more than makes up for it with the fact it has a huge number of USB ports and M.2 mounts, allowing for lots of peripherals, lots of storage, and it more than holds up when it comes to raw CPU and gaming performance, making it perfect for a high-end gaming PC build and for those who like to make gaming content.