ASUS ROG Z690-I Gaming WiFi Motherboard Preview

Peter Donnell / 3 years ago

ASUS and its Republic of Gamers branding have long been a staple for the enthusiast PC market. While they’ve got more affordable motherboards under the ASUS banner, their ROG hardware typically focused on more high-end products. Mini-ITX motherboards are few and far between these days, let alone ones that fall into the higher-end part of the market. ASUS is well known for its innovation in the mini-ITX market too, so with all that in mind, I’m expecting this motherboard to be pretty potent when it comes to performance and features, but also expecting a sting in the tail from the retail price. ROG, Mini-ITX, DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and lots of other fancy new features won’t be coming cheap.

ASUS ROG Z690-I Gaming WiFi

Despite the smaller form factor, it really doesn’t look like ASUS has compromised on features here. About the only thing that looks somewhat trimmed down is the VRM, which is a 10+1 Power Stage design running 105A. That’s still significant for a motherboard of this size though, and more than enough to get great performance from the flagship Intel CPUs. Of course, it’s ready for the new LGA1700 socket CPUs, and while some Z690 boards are running DDR4, ASUS has kept this into the higher end section with the use of two DDR5 slots with XMP 3.0 support. There’s a full-size PCIe 5.0 x16 slot too, ensuring you’re future proof for upcoming storage and graphics cards. However, the M.2 slots run on the plenty fast PCIe Gen4 interface. However, this board uses an M.2 slot to stack three daughterboards into the design, but we’ll get to those shortly. Beyond that, you get extremely good connectivity, with plenty of USB 3.2 ports, the latest Thunderbolt 4, WiFi 6 and 2.5 GbE LAN.