ASUS TUF Gaming Z690-Plus WiFi D4 Motherboard Preview

Motherboard Overview

We actually reviewed the old Z590 version of this motherboard earlier in the year, and absolutely loved it. However, this new model keeps much of the same design, but there’s a lot of refinements taking place here too. For starters, it’s been murdered out, with the two-tone light grey and black replaced with a black and slightly darker black design. The decals are all smartened up too, and it just looks cooler overall.

The ASUS TUF Gaming Z690-Plus WiFi D4 features a 14+1 80A Power Stage design with DrMos, with upgraded heatsinks vs the last generations model. There’s also a newer 6-layer PCB design, which they say has double the copper layers to ensure better power delivery from PSU connectors to the CPU.

Those huge heatsinks have some chunky fins stacked vertically, but also some angled horizontal slots to allow for better airflow. Furthermore, the board is littered with all-black 10K caps, which give it a more premium look overall, and add to the overall build quality.

The CPU draws power from the ProCool headers, which offer up an 8+4 PSU configuration, ensuring some more power and more stable voltages to the CPU; especially when overclocking.

The board features four DDR4 DIMM slots, with some small metal reinforcements on the ends and the mid-pin. It’ll support up to DDR4 5133 MHz (OC) Non-CC, Un-buffered memory.

The top PCIe lane is fully armoured and comes with the latest PCIe 5.0 x16 configuration, ensuring its future proof for upcoming expansion cards and GPUs. However, below it, you’ll find 2 x PCIe 3.0 x1 slots, a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, and a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot (supports x4 mode) at the bottom. That’s quite a mixture, but great if you have a lot of PCIe devices. There are two massive heatsinks too, offerings protection and cooling for the built-in M.2 mounts, which all support the PCIe 4.0 standard.

The board features two SATA ports on the right side, and there are two more along the bottom edge of the board.

Audio comes from the Realtek 7.1 Surround Sound chipset, which supports up to 24-Bit/192 kHz playback and uses those lovely Japanese Audio Capacitors. I’m not 100% of the chipset model yet though, but I’ll find that out for the full review.

The rear I/O is well equipped, offering up six USB 3.2 ports, as well as a 2×2 Type-C port. There’s an HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 at the top, 2.5 GbE LAN and WiFi 6 too, giving you some pretty great connectivity overall.

Finally, there’s some RGB built into the right side of the board, it’s kept fairly minimal and tasteful though.