ASUS ROG Strix Z790-E Gaming WiFi II Motherboard Review

How Much Does It Cost?

The ROG STRIX Z790-E GAMING WIFI motherboard is available now, and while it launched with an MSRP of £556.99 it’s currently on Amazon for a more reasonable £449.99 and we’ve even seen some short-run offers taking it down as far as £400, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for hot deals on this one.

Overview

This is one of the easiest conclusions I’ve had to write in a while, as this motherboard is simply brilliant in almost every regard. There is a little room for improvement, or at least, a few features that can be on similarly priced motherboards, but they’re hardly deal breakers. 2.5 GbE LAN and WiFi 6E are the main ones, both of which are more than enough for my internet speeds and home network capabilities, but some boards already have 5 GbE or even 10 GbE as well as WiFi 7 on this chipset. There is no 40 Gbps USB 4/Thunderbolt either, but admittedly, if these features were included and with all the other features already included on this motherboard, it would undoubtedly increase the price quite a bit.

This is built to be a gaming motherboard, and it certainly delivers in that regard. It consistently delivered some of the best 1% lows and average frame rates across multiple games in our testing. It also scores very strong in synthetic gaming benchmarks, with all-around extremely fast CPU, memory, storage and GPU performance throughout all of our testing.

However, the CPU performance is really spectacular, thanks to the overall impressive efficiency, powerful VRM configuration, and truly excellent cooling solutions, it was able to run the CPU better than expected, resulting in a motherboard that’s both great for gaming, but also content creation such as video rendering.

Should I Buy One?

If you’re looking for a great gaming motherboard, that packs an impressive punch for computational heavy workloads such as game development and video rendering, this is one of the best on the market. It’s also backed up by an impressive amount of storage options and more USB ports on the rear I/O than you’ll typically see in this price range. Really, if you’re not putting this at the top or very near the top of your options list for your next gaming PC build, you’ve not been paying attention to this review.