ASUS ROG STRIX Z790-I Gaming WiFi Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

It’s certainly a great-looking motherboard, with a surprisingly massive set of VRM heatsinks relative to the size of the motherboard itself. Of course, that’s a good thing, keeping your VRM cool is a big advantage for CPU performance.

There’s a ProCool II power connector too, which features more durable pins, soldering and a metal sleeve around the connector.

Under all that lovely armour, you can see there’s a 10+1 VRM configuration, which features 105A stages, alloy chokes, and 10K capacitors, which is again all fantastic and I wouldn’t expect less from a high-end motherboard like this. Further down, you can see there are two slots above the PCIe mount, allowing for some add-in PCBs that stack up to provide a PCIe 5.0 M.2 and a PCIe 4.0 M.2 to be sandwiched between the stacking and thick heatsinks, while also forming the chipset heatsink too.

The heatsinks look great though, and I love the mixture of digital textures and reflective surfaces that makes up the board’s design. Below the heatsink, you’ll find a single PCIe 5.0 slot, which is heavily reinforced so dealing with the bulk of a modern GPU shouldn’t be an issue for it.

The rear I/O certainly looks interesting, as it seems to be missing a few bits, most notably the audio jacks. As I said though, they’re on the Hive desktop unit. Here you do get three Type-C ports, and some USB 3.2 10Gbps Type-A too, so connectivity is great if you’re using a lot of high-speed external storage. Furthermore, with WiFi 6E and 2.5 GbE LAN, networking is pretty swift too. The Hive features a Type-C, and Type-A BIOS flash port, headphone and microphone jacks, and the Flex/Bios keys too, so there’s no need to reach behind the PC to get to the goodies anymore.