Introduction
I like being surprised and that applies to gifts as well as product announcements. With Intel still propagating this trend of allowing “previews” of motherboards to go live before actual embargo date, it perpetuates this overreliance on early access, something the rest of the global media does not enjoy compared to some choice partners. That being said, I have to apologize and thank ASUS at the same time for allowing as meet Intel’s embargo date but I apologize in advance for delaying the reviews for their lot of motherboards.
Rants aside, we have finally here: the hybrid era. Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake CPUs have set the stage to what could be an intense push-and-pull contention between AMD and Intel in the coming years on who takes the performance crown but regardless who takes it, the crux of this performance gains has been the growing cost of performance. Bleeding-edge performance has been a pricey affair for HEDT but now that it has bled to MSDT, the platform cost has leap-frogged HEDT as well. ROG isn’t shy about putting a tax over their products but this is the entrance fee to the exclusive ROG club and ASUS is making sure that club is now more premium than ever. With pricing already announced prior to launch, ASUS is now selling $2200 motherboards as part of their ROG line up with the entry level board of the ROG family still falling to the HERO class motherboard, with the entry for this generation having an asking price of $700.
This generation’s MAXIMUS lineup breaks the numbered naming tradition with this generation’s release now basing its numbering on the chipset. Yes, today we have the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO. Its just like when they changed the Jordan numbering in 2009 after the Jordan 23 released, so instead of a Jordan 24, we had the Air Jordan 2009. It took 4 years and 4 iterations that didn’t take off for Jordan Brand to bring back the traditional numbering and hopefully ASUS does not wait 4 more generation to realize the lack of a chipset distinction in the name is one of the key attributes of an ROG motherboard. I won’t even wait until the conclusion of this article to say that this is a bad idea and ASUS should revert back to the MAXIMUS XV next-generation. Otherwise, all ROG motherboard following this naming might as well just be an ROG STRIX, albeit an expensive one.
On the upside, the MAXIMUS Z690 generation is the melting pot of a lot of ROG technology waiting to fuse together to create a signature product line. This is in combination with Intel’s new feature for accompanying motherboards for their Z690 chipset.
Z690 introduces plenty of additions to Intel’s board offering. The first of which is PCIe 5.0 support. The larger bandwidth means supporting devices have double the bandwidth of PCIe Gen4. The Z690 chipset also brings with it DMI 4.0, another interface improvement doubling over what DMI 3.0 offers. The most anticipated change with this new platform is the jump from DDR4 to DDR5. While Alder Lake will support either DDR4 or DDR5 depending on the board, DDR5 promises faster speeds. Intel will also push USB3.2 Gen2x2 which will offer up to 20Gbps of bandwidth with many boards pushing Thunderbolt4 as well.
With regards the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS family of motherboards for the Z690, ASUS is once again arming their boards with a hefty VRM design with boards starting at 20 phases, all of which operating at teaming arrangement and are all comprising of Smart Power Stages instead of DrMOS. This is coupled with plenty of quality-of-life improvements as well a new design language for the ROG MAXIMUS line for this generation basing off their AnimeMetrix laptop design.
ASUS will be releasing five models on launch the ROG Z690 family as listed below with their Philippine pricing:
Model Name | SRP |
ROG MAXIMUS Z690 EXTREME GLACIAL | PHP 111,290 |
ROG MAXIMUS Z690 EXTREME | PHP 58,270 |
ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA | PHP 41,770 |
ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO | PHP 34,700 |
ROG MAXIMUS Z690 APEX | PHP 38,630 |
In this review, we’ll be taking a look at the ROG MAXIMUS XIV Z690 HERO and see what this generation brings to the table to go alongside Intel’s new CPUs. Read on!
ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO Specifications | |
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CPU Support | Intel 12th-generation Core CPU (LGA1700) |
Power Delivery Design | 20+1 |
Chipset | Intel Z690 |
Memory Support | 4 x DIMM, Max. 128GB, DDR5-6400 (OC) |
Expansion Slots | 2x PCIe 5.0 x16 or x8/x8 (CPU) 1x PCIe 4.0 x16 (x4, x4/x4) |
Storage Interface/s | 3x M.2 8x SATA (via Hyper M.2 card) 2x M.2 |
Networking | Intel 2.5GbE 2×2 WIFI-6E Bluetooth 5.2 |
Audio | Realtek S1220A |
Fan Headers | 7x 4-pin 1x pump header |
Dimensions | ATX 30.5cm x 24.4cm |
Rear I/O Ports | 2 x Thunderbolt™ 4 USB Type-C port(s) 7 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 port(s) (6 x Type-A, 1x Type-C) 2 x USB 2.0 (Type-A)1 x HDMI port 1 x ASUS Wi-Fi Module 1 x Intel 2.5Gb Ethernet port5 x Audio jacks 1 x Optical S/PDIF output1 x BIOS FlashBack™ button 1 x Clear CMOS button |
Features | Extreme OC Kit
Extreme Engine Digi+
ASUS Q-Design
ASUS Thermal Solution
ASUS EZ DIY
AURA Sync
Front Panel USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 with Quick Charge 4+ Support
ASUS HYDRANODE
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Packaging and Box Contents
The ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO package includes the following:
Cables
- 1 x ARGB RGB extension cable
- 1 x RGB extension cable
- 4 x SATA 6Gb/s cables
ROG Hyper M.2 Card
- 1 x ROG Hyper M.2 Card with heatsink
- 2 x M.2 screw packages for ROG Hyper M.2 Card
Miscellaneous
- 1 x ASUS Wi-Fi moving antennas
- 1 x M.2 Q-Latch package
- 2 x M.2 Q-Latch packages for M.2 backplate
- 1 x M.2 Rubber Package
- 1 x Q-connector
- 1 x ROG Graphics card holder
- 1 x ROG stickers
- 1 x ROG key chain
- 1 x ROG thank you card
Installation Media
- 1 x USB drive with utilities and drivers
Documentation
- 1 x User Guide
This generation of ASUS ROG motherboard includes an accessory PCIe card called the Hyper M.2 card which supports PCIe Gen5 on compatible devices. This adds two more slots of Gen4 M.2 or a single PCIe Gen5 when used.
ASUS also includes a magnetic GPU support brace as well as a USB3.2 Gen2 32GB flash drive for driver installation and personal use with ROG Z690 motherboards.
Design and Layout
ASUS has stuck with a pure black design on their ROG boards since the MAXIMUS X and have went darker and darker after. Four generations later, we now have a completely black theme broken up with glass and metal parts but for the most part, are matte black allthroughout. This design choice is mirrored on all the Z690 motherboards as well.
As mentioned, ASUS bolsters their power delivery for Intel’s 12th-gen CPUs with their improved VRM design for this generation. The ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO uses a 20+1 power delivery design and is cooled by a dense heatsink that spans both top and side arrays.
An important thing to note is that Intel requires a new mounting size for its LGA1700 socket. With the mounts vertically the same, ASUS has taken the step into maintaining compatibility with LGA1200 and older coolers by using two pre-drilled holes support both LGA1700 and LGA1200. They’ve done this previously with the ROG X370 AM4 motherboards and is a very nice touch and attention to detail. Something that doesn’t scream cashgrab despite ASUS selling their own coolers.
In addition to the Hyper M.2 card that ASUS includes, the board has a built-in array of M.2 slots. All the M.2 slots feature ASUS’ smart Q-latch lock which is a very handy way of securing M.2 in place without needing to screw things down.
The smartest addition on this board perhaps, and on any motherboard, for that matter, is the PCIe Q-release button. With GPUs ending up covering the release latch on the PCIe slot, it gets very tricky removing them. With ASUS’ Q-release function, it makes it easy to pop off the lock and release the GPU or whatever PCIe device you have plugged. This is coupled with ASUS’ SafeSlot design which pretty much bolts the PCIe slot in place making sure it doesn’t buckle under heavy GPUs.
The ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO features 7x USB3.2 Gen2 ports with one of those a Type-C port and the rest Type-A. The board also has two Thunderbolt4 ports as well as a pair of USB2.0 ports for legacy devices. I’m disappointed to see this board only has 2.5GbE instead of 10GbE though. The rear I/O area includes HDMI output, SPDIF out, 5 audio jacks and a Clear CMOS and Bios FlashBack button. Lastly we have the connectors for the WIFI/BT antenna.
BIOS Walkthrough
ASUS’ ROG BIOS is uniform in design between ROG and ROG Strix products, the difference is in the increasingly granular control. The MAXIMUS Z690 HERO retains the modern ROG BIOS with a rich array of features for controlling some of the new knobs that Intel introduces in their Alder Lake CPUs.
ASUS previously highlighted their AI features on the Z590 and while those are still retained in this released, they don’t get much of the marketing spotlight aside from the main bullets in the product page. In the BIOS menu, AI Overclocking and AI Cooling can be accessed which can be trained after some time in using the board to adjust the cooling as well as the overclock of the CPU.
We tested with BIOS 0702 for this review.
Test Setup and Methodology
All tests are performed in the latest version of Windows 11. For earlier reports of AMD suffering performance issues, please refer to this update published by AMD which notes that the issue has been resolved.
All systems tested use the same version of the application and no data from previous reviews are used for this test. All games are updated to their latest version and are set to details indicated in their charts. Back2Gaming prefers running games in max details with motion blur off.
Test System: Intel (10th/11th) | |
CPU | Intel Core i9-11900K, Intel Core i9-10900K |
Motherboard | ASUS ROG MAXIMUS XIII EXTREME |
RAM | G.Skill TridentZ Royal DDR4-4000 C17 16GBx2 |
GPU | ZOTAC RTX 3080 Ti AMP EXTREME |
Storage | KLEVV CRAS 920 2TB M.2 NVMe |
Cooling | NZXT Kraken X73 RGB |
Power Supply | FSP HydroG Pro 1000w |
Test System: Intel 12th | |
CPU | Intel Core i9-12900K |
Motherboard | ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO |
RAM | Kingston FURY Beast DDR5-5200 CL40 |
GPU | ZOTAC RTX 3080 Ti AMP EXTREME |
Storage | KLEVV CRAS 920 2TB M.2 NVMe |
Cooling | NZXT Kraken X73 RGB |
Power Supply | FSPÂ HydroG Pro 1000w |
Test System: AMD | |
CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X |
Motherboard | ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Formula |
RAM | G.Skill TridentZ Royal DDR4-4000 C17 16GBx2 |
GPU | ZOTAC RTX 3080 Ti AMP EXTREME |
Storage | KLEVV CRAS 920 2TB M.2 NVMe |
Cooling | NZXT Kraken X73 RGB |
Power Supply | FSP HydroG Pro 1000w |
Special thanks to ASUS, GIGABYTE, Kingston, FSP and ZOTAC for the hardware used in this test. Special thanks to Cybenetics Labs, NVIDIA, PassMark ,OCCT and CapFrameX for the testing equipment and software we use in this review.
All testing for motherboards are done with XMP enabled (DDR5-5200).
Storage and Network Interface Testing
The ASUS MAXIMUS Z690 HERO has a large array of USB3.2 Gen2 USB ports. As of this moment, I am still sourcing USB 3.2 Gen2x2 enclosures for testing so I have to forego testing on that port as well as Thunderbolt4. We do test the Intel 2.5GbE and USB3.2 Gen2 headers on this board.
We test the throughput of the primary I/O of our tested motherboard using various devices as follows:
- M.2 NVMe: KLEVV CRAS 920 2TB
- USB 3.2 Gen2: ROG STRIX Arion USB Enclosure + Kingston KC2000 1TB M.2 SSD
- SATA: SAMSUNG 870 QVO 1TB
- LAN: QNAP TS-932PX 10GbE NAS + WD Blue SSD 1TB x2 RAID0
All tests are done in Crystal DiskMark v8.
NOTE: These charts do not show data in decreasing/increasing values.
These are all the slots on this motherboard for M.2. We did not include the ROG Hyper M.2 card in this testing.
Performance Testing – Synthetic
SuperPI
wPrime
Cinebench R23
Blender Benchmark
AIDA64 Memory Benchmark
3DMark
Performance Testing – Gaming
All games tested with an RTX 3080 Ti.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO)
DOTA 2
Rainbow Six: Siege
The Witcher III: Wild Hunt
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Overclocking Experience
Overclocking Intel 12th-gen CPU will introduce some new details for those familiar with Intel overclocking but the concept will largely remain the same. The main changes are with the 2 different core types requiring different voltages as well as having their own multipliers and walls.
As this is our first high-end board alongside the Z690 AORUS Master, comparing results on both is a safe approximation on what our CPU is capable of is still a guess than an actual conclusion.
That said, the most reliable OC I’ve achieved on manual on this board is 5.2Ghz/4.1Ghz (P+E) on 1.48v. Unfortunately, this temperature is hard to tame even on 360mm AIO. Knowing that ASUS has AI Cooling and AI OC, I first trained the cooler by doing our VRM temp testing. With that data in the system, I went ahead and gave AI OC a try. AI OC set our system for 5.4Ghz with a 5.1Ghz for AVX on the P-Cores. ASUS was feeling generous on the E-cores forcing 4.3Ghz. The E-cores weren’t unstable and dialing back to 4.1Ghz made the E-Cores more rock stable while the P-core heat was fairly tough to manage at the prescribed setting which I had to reduce to 5.2Ghz to see more manageable Cinebench R23 load testing results.
There’s a lot to play around here, and ASUS provides a lot of knobs and options, most of which are under menus in the tweaker options and does not have much explanation provided with them. While ASUS did provide an OC guide, its not as in-depth as one would’ve liked but that’s not dismissing the helpful information provided in the guide. It just shows that there is a wealth of options here and a lot more undiscovered details that a lot of media doing early reviews will definitely need to explore again once more information has been discovered as well as to better manage the heat output of Alder Lake, particularly the 12900K.
Power Draw & Temperature
For power draw testing, please refer to my CPU power draw testing for the Core i9-12900K. Due to the short time we’ve had for testing, I’ve yet to develop a formal testing for Alder Lake motherboard to isolate each power load properly. At the moment, we monitor all power lines individually for power testing but have not yet concluded a formal way to measure power testing that would vary enough to justify the board’s actual power draw. That said, this will be developed in a future review.
For temperature testing, we use a thermal logger that capture per second readings from our VRM. Our logger captures the temperature of the VRM arrays with the left array as VRM1 and upper array as VRM2. Our 15-minute split load puts continuous load on our CPU with 5-minute in-between.
User Experience & Conclusion
There’s a lot to take in here and it’s going to take a couple more motherboard reviews to really squeeze out everything and standardize my opinion on the platform. As of right now, Intel’s 12th-gen CPU has given Intel the lead once again in some performance test which is enough to test AMD’s lead and for the majority of those covering Intel to give them the gaming performance crown. I’m proud enough to proclaim the same claim as well and I play enough games on all platforms to appreciate what’s a meaningful performance increase. Back to our motherboard, the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO is the gateway model the Z690 ROG products. It serves as a sampler to what ROG offers and a lot of what we cover earlier in this article doesn’t begin to describe the excellent quality-of-life additions that ASUS has included in their new motherboards.
The PCI-E Q-Release button, the M.2 Q-Latch, the backwards compatibility mounting holes, a 20-phase power delivery design, these are just some of the items you normally don’t add to your checklist but the MAXIMUS Z690 HERO checks them off right off the bat. Little things like will probably not be included with other brands’ boards in this generation but by the arrival of B660 or Z790, expect them to be commonplace.
So let’s focus more than the strengths of this board aside from what we’ve mentioned already. As mentioned, the board’s strength in DIY is fairly strong but add to that the BIOS FlashBack function and Clear CMOS buttons readily available from the back along with onboard buttons, make it an excellent board when troubleshooting. I/O and connectivity is rich when it comes to USB and Thunderbolt is a nice option to have as well but won’t really see much action given the amount of TB devices available in the market right now. I do have to point out that it is such a disappointment to see only 2.5GbE on this board rather than 10GbE. As the interface becomes more prevalent, ASUS should stick with one LAN option instead of varying them across products. Still, this is a company that puts single 2.5GbE ports on switches for whatever reason they them a 2.5GbE uplink would mean anything.
In that same vein, ROG’s Hyper M.2 card seems pretty straightforward but some little quirks that some may not find out until they use up all the slots. I do feel the board alone has plenty of M.2 slots and the card is more of a novelty but for those that want to use it, do know that it has toggles in the BIOS options that you need to setup to make it work.
Speaking of BIOS, overclocking options are rich in this board. Far richer than any previous HERO class boards we’ve seen from ASUS. This may be primarily due to Intel’s large assortment of tweakability options like individual AVX offsets, specific voltages, core disabling options, etc. A lot of this settings you would expect from an Extreme or APEX-class board but its to see ASUS going all out with this board.
Special mention to ASUS’ AI features that made my overclocking discovery quite less challenging especially as I went into boards that lacked those features for this review series.
Wrapping everything up, the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO is a vast improvement over previous HERO-class motherboards and for a good reason; at its current asking price, it has make a compelling argument for it to standout as the ROG STRIX presents a compelling case for Z690 motherboard especially if you just want a gaming rig. ASUS smartly made the distinction quite clearer with the large different in overall build and component quality. While the ROG Strix is a very high-quality board, the ROG Z690 lineup sits on a class of their own. So much so that even AORUS Z690 MASTER which is practically an AORUS XTREME Lite Version barely ties it for build quality.
And before I end this review, I did not mention the Polymo Lighting in this review. That’s the lighting array in the I/O shroud of the HERO. This is the only lighting on this board and while some may like it, its a rather gimmicky concept in lighting, something a proper LCD could’ve taken done better with. Still, its decent enough if you want a Vegas strip billboard for ASUS on your board. Personally, it lacks customization option, something the dotted AnimeMetrix-inspired look suggests.
In a time where components and raw materials are rare and other components are extortionately high, a product has to have a compelling enough reason to really justify its cost. At $700, the ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO, despite its entry-level distinction, has some big shoes to fill and its well-rounded feature set and excellent build quality make it the go-to starter board if you want a foundation that matches the asking price of the Core i7-12700K or Core i9-12900K.
ASUS backs the ROG MAXIMUS Z690 HERO with a 3-year warranty. It receives our B2G Recommended Seal and B2G Gold Award for ease-of-use.