20 Best Z490 Motherboard For 10700K (2023 Updated)

This is the second time I’ve done a build with a version of this Motherboard, I just built a water cooled Gaming PC for a client who wanted a Ryzen 9 5900x and an RTX 3080, and had a £2500 budget, so I used the AMD version of this motherboard.

Then Last month (March 2022) I built a gaming PC for a streamer that could run Elden Ring, and because was streaming the build put a price limit of £500. So I used this Motherboard again and paired it with an intel i5 10400k.

It’s a sold motherboard with space for 2 M. 2 drives and a USB-C front panel header, which is always something to look out for when building a streaming PC if you want a multi camera setup as most decent webcams run USB-C these days.

This motherboard really falls right in the sweet spot between price and quality, it’s reasonably cheap at £100-£120 depending on whether you get the wifi version. I got the wifi version because the last build I did for myself I thought “well it’s connected using ethernet so I don’t need wifi” forgetting of course that this meant I now had no bluetooth either.

I love this motherboard it’s easy to use and it looks bad ass, the RGBs are subtle enough that you can almost forget about them. I would absolutely recommend this motherboard to anyone who’s got their build chosen and has a £100-£120 budget for the motherboard.

I purchased this board as part of a mid range gaming machine for a former classmate’s son back in January 2021. Because of the ridiculous gpu debacle going on, the video card I ordered of course was not in stock when I went to actually pay for the package back in mid January.

Shame on you newegg for not improving your software or notification techniques to accurately show stock you can actually buy. I am sure many, many people agree with me on this. So after finally having to purchase a prebuilt machine just to get a dang video card at what today would be called a decent price (after I sell of the remaining box to help offset the cost), I get the new card installed and boot the machine.

All is working great, Windows is loaded, drivers are loaded, and was downloading Windows updates when it froze. Just randomly locked up. Parts inside were very cool, no pops, no magic smoke anywhere, no error messages.

Only a hard shutdown brought it back. And then it started freezing every time, but at random points. Finally it was freezing before I even got to the welcome screen. Then finally just would not boot at all, not even turn on the monitor.

At first i though maybe the video card I got was borked so I swapped my video card in: nope, nothing, nada. Installed the new gpu in my machine and viola! works just fine. So video card is not the problem.

Tried the other pcie slot too, nothing. Took so long to finally get the machine started because I couldn’t get a video card that now the mobo is out of Newegg warranty and now I have to deal with MSI directly.

I have been a long time user of Newegg’s services but I feel they have neglected to deal with this gpu farce for their customers in a more customer friendly way. This very disappointing as my customer paid a good chunk of cash for this machine, her son has been patiently waiting, but because of human greed and disdain for doing the right thing LOTS of people are probably in my same position: can’t finish a build due to epically out of proportion video card prices and then when the time comes and a part has failed, there isn’t a decent return policy in place because it took to long to find out a part was bad.

Very disappointed. Now lets see what kind of run around I get with MSI. Hopefully I can get a replacement in a reasonable amount of time.

Utilized this motherboard with my build that I put together earlier this year and of the complaints that I have they are minor and partially a factor of the case that I’m using. The one flaw that gave me the most fits was the USB 3.

0 header which is on the right most portion of the board which unfortunately lined up right against a shroud for cable management in my Corsair case. Basically I ended up having to disassemble the case and attach the 3.

0 USB before remounting it. Again though, that’s specific to my case and MSI can only do so much to prevent that. Wifi performance is good with this motherboard and the BIOS is pretty easy to use. XMP can be easily enabled via a button press on the main screen of the BIOS or by digging in deeper.

BIOS offers an ‘easy’ mode and a more indepth mode, something I’m a big proponent of as some minor modifications can really help out your system performance and can definitely be intimidating for someone new to working with computers.

This offers a good amount of header options for things such as LED’s and fans. Pretty good value.

I’m almost two years into this board, originally built it with a 2060 and 10400. Then upgraded the BIOS to switch to a 11700K, moved to a 2080Ti. This board has surpassed my expectations so far. I wanted to build something that could withstand time a little better than others and so far this board has done just that.

I’m still running everything in PCIe Gen3 until I end up moving to a 30 series RTX, but so far my performances are really good. The “memory try it” feature of the BIOS is pretty good. I’m currently running the unit overclocked at 4.

9Ghz on all cores with a 200 core boost on the 2080Ti and 32Gb of 3200mhz Corsair vengeance pro on XMP1. No blue screen or crash in the two years I’ve had this board. It’s solid, it does the job, it’s reliable, it’s priced well, and you get constant BIOS support from MSI.

definitely a good buy.

I was looking to upgrade my 8 year old MSI motherboard to a 10th gen board. That board was solid for me, so I decided to stick with MSI, rather than Gigabyte. (Plus, the Gigabyte 10th gen boards were more expensive.

) While I’m not a hard-core gamer, I do plan on playing games with this PC. As I don’t really care about RGB on the board, I opt’d out of the Gaming Plus board for this cheaper Pro model. From what I can tell RGB is the only notable difference in the two.

Edit – 8/8/20: The ALC1220 audio codec on the Gaming Plus board is supposedly better than the ALC892 on this Pro board. The Gaming Plus board also has an S/PDIF audio connector. As the MSI web site says, this is a well-constructed board.

I could tell just by taking it out of the box.

Things have certainly changed a bit since my last MB purchase, which was an MSI Z97 Krait edition, which honestly was mostly selected on aesthetics. There just isn’t something like that available nowadays, so this seemed like the best available option.

As someone who wants the features of Z490, but doesn’t need anything more than that, this fits the bill just fine. The visual design isn’t really exactly what I was hoping for, and I miss the striking black and white of the Krait edition boards, but if you don’t absolutely have to have RGB and the additional things the more expensive boards have, this is really all you need.

My experience installing and using it so far have been great. as an old-school PC builder I am still not used to how easy things are nowadays. The only real BIOS tweaks I needed to do were to enable RAID and XMP.

After that, it picked up my existing RAID array and ran my RAM at its rated speed with no issues at all.

At the time of writing, the ACE is eligible for a rebate through the MSI Review Rebate Program. Make sure you check the MSI website to see if your purchase of any MSI product has a rebate available as nobody even knew about this to let me know! I have recently changed/upgraded from using Gigabyte (Master) and Asus to MSI motherboards.

Not only do I get a high-end product, but much more for the money – why spend the same amount for a hero mobo which only offers 2. 5 Gbps LAN when I get 10 Gbps with MSI?!! That is a huge speed difference when I am sending large data files between my computers! And you’ve got to shell out even more for Asus’ Extreme to get that! Also, I am loving MSI’s BIOS (UEFI) layout! It is so logical and easy to use for overclocking! The performance of the ACE is incredible! The only option I’d really like to see added is for the Smart Button to allow entering the BIOS as the other 4 options don’t really do anything for me.

I have become an MSI fan, and if they continue with this kind of quality, I will remain one! – Fantastic board! -H. Haddix.

This is the first negative experience I’ve had with an MSI product. (Admittedly out of only like 3 products purchased, I think. ) Maybe they got a bad batch of components from a supplier or something.

But would I buy this particular product again? No. And I must admit to feeling a little gun shy on buyimg future MSI products. Sadly, the product is out of warranty, but well within the expected lifespan of a motherboard this expensive.

One of the advantages of the E Gaming over some other Asus Z490 motherboards is the onboard Intel AX201 Wifi 6 (802. 11ax) and Bluetooth 5. 1. It is very useful to be able to simply attach the antenna and connect to the network without the restrictions of a LAN cable.

Wifi performance is excellent. The same is true for the Bluetooth. There are other conveniences – the full array of USB ports of all current varieties including Type C, the excellent onboard sound, BIOS flashback and the integral I/O shield.

And yes, there are RGB headers including the Gen 2 addressable variety which can be configured with the AURA Sync software. Like all ROG Strix boards the real purpose of this board is to extract as much performance as possible from the Intel CPU.

To do this a variety of BIOS options are available. On one level the whole process can be fully automatic, with a choice of the Intel defaults or the performance enhancing Asus settings. Asus also provides a significant degree of automatic overclocking of the processor and/or memory.

Alternatively the manual controls are there to replace the automation or fine-tune the auto-generated settings. All of this is backed up with high quality power supply components and extensive heatsinking of the components involved.

The E Gaming is not entirely without flaws. The automatic overclocking tends to set the CPU voltage at too high a level leading to excessive processor temperatures. A good AIO cooler could be the answer but in practice it may be better to resort to manual tweaking to rectify this.

Although only a minor issue, it would also have been nice if the Wifi antenna had a magnetic base to hold it in place on the top of the case. These points aside, be in no doubt that this board offers a formidable array of capabilities and absolutely top-notch performance.

In short, Gaming by name, Gaming by nature.

Had this MB for less than two months and one day my computer would not boot. Did all the usual troubleshooting starting with power supply, then memory, then MB & processor. Discovered both MB and processor were bad.

I design and build low voltage control systems for oilfield equipment, so I’m an experienced electrician. After going through the motherboard with a meter, I discovered the VRM’s were bad. Intel promptly replaced the processor.

Now that is outstanding customer service. Asus, however is trying to say that the bad VRM’s were “customer induced damage” and want to charge me to fix the MB. If you search the web, this seems to be very common of Asus.

I will never buy another Asus product again. I am going to only purchase products from a reputable company who actually honors their warranty, like EVGA.

This mobo would be solid if the ethernet ports worked. I upgraded to this board about a year ago and straight out of the box the ethernet ports didn’t work. I spent hours of research, reading forums, updating drivers, updating bios, trying new cables, everything and couldn’t get them to work.

I even tried to get the included wifi adapter to work but to no avail. Eventually rma’d the board and reordered a second one. The second board had the same issue. No ethernet connection. But the wifi adapter card worked for that one.

I didnt want to RMA the board a second time so I ended up ordering a separate ethernet card because I dont want to use wifi and that worked. So yeah been using the board for about a year with no issues other than the whole ethernet thing.

Hopefully they have got that sorted out.

Superbe Carte mais une énorme galère pour installer l’OS sur cette CM. En effet, le mode UEFI, rend très difficile l’installation de W10. Il aura fallut plusieurs heures pour enfin empecher W10 de sans arrêt rebooter son installation.

Bien penser à formater son SSD avec l’outil inclus ds le BIOS, Erase Data+++, qui permettra à la CM de bien reconnaître votre SSD.

Superbe carte mere avec toutes les connectivites requises pour pouvoir exploiter votre carte mère de manière optimum dans le gaming. Je ma recommande fortement.

SUPER CARTE MAIS AVEC I7 11700KF DÉFAUT LED DRAM IL FAUT MET UN PROCESSEUR 10TH GEN PUIS FLASHER LE BIOS AVEC LA DERNIÈRE VERSION CHEZ MSI. SI NON SUPER CARTE 🙂

I worked days setting up my custom water loop, 4 NVMe drives (all listed on the motherboards compatibility list) and just cannot get this board to run right. Tech support was unable to get the issue fixed but I figured it out so could boot into Windows but will not reset into the boot drive and always crashed back into the BIOS (which is also updated to latest version).

I have UEFI set up correctly as well and went through the whole troubleshooting process – reset to default, reset the CMOS etc. I eventually got Windows 11 installed, ran benchmarks and my CPU idles between 30-35 and on the stress, it only went to 45-50 so cooling on the board is good on my CPU water block.

The chipset itself, sits around 70 degrees Celsius in my Lian Li Dynamic 11 which I think is a little warm but the new chipset might just run hot. I ran Cyberpunk and it crashed. Also with COD Vanguard.

Ran 3dmark okay and Battlefield 5, so I am not sure if that might be Windows 11. I am also running Lian Li SL120’s and they will not sync with the Armory crate so I cannot control fan speed curves, only sync the lighting.

So sometimes it sounds like a plane taking off all of the sudden with 9 fans spinning 100%rpm for no reason. The board always overclocks my processor. It just keeps wanting to squeeze more out of it and their methods of turning off their A.

I. overclock are a little confusing because you have to tell it to “stop learning” Pushed my P- Cores to 5400MHz LOL so at least I know not that I got a good CPU. I didnt turn on overclocking and do not want to play with overclocking yet until I have programs installed and then I can start playing with those settings because the P and E core overclocking is new for me.

Regardless, this should run like a Cadillac out of the box, I have built many PC’s, using ASUS mobo’s and this has been this has most difficult and frustrating build I have encountered thus far. For the price I paid, the continuous troubleshooting to even get it running out of the box, I cannot recommend this to my fellow PC gamers and building enthusiast.

No Doubt, It is the prettiest looking boards on the market for Z690’s white case builds but sometimes looks are not everything.

I have bought this board more than once hoping that the first one was a defective unit, unfortunately this board is plagued with two issue that I find unreasonable for its price range. Pros: It looks amazing, the VRM’s are good, the LED display is very nice and it will look great with a white build.

CONS: Unfortunately there were two main issues with this board which caused me to return it. 1. The ethernet will stop working if put under stress. If you have fast 1gb down speeds and are doing something like downloading and watching youtube etc, there is a likelihood that the ethernet port will stop working and you will lose internet connection.

The only fix is to use windows trouble shooting to get it back or to unplug and re-plug the ethernet at the back of your motherboard. This has happened to me on the latest bios and lan drivers. If you type into your browser “”z690 formula loss of ethernet”” you can see that other’s are experiencing the same issue.

They should have gone with a 2. 5g intel lan ethernet port instead of the marvel 10g ethernet port. Most users won’t even benefit from 10G. And most tech youtubers have not listed this as an issue with the board all they do is talk about its aesthetics, vrm temps, and pricing.

I have gone through 3 of these boards and they all have this flaw. 2. If you are using corsair dominator ram you will have to go into the bios and set SPD to False so that it actually shows up in corsair ICUE (look this up in case you have a hard time believing this).

And even then with two separate ram kits tested the lightning effects will stop updating or freeze mid animation. This is absolutely unacceptable considering I was using a z390 asus board and corsair dominator ram (ddr4) and never had to do this for the intel 9th gen build I replaced.

Bottom line it is a very nice looking board and it has a very nice bios. Unfortunately if you are spending around $1000 for a motherboard these issues are absolutely unacceptable. I ended up going with an MSI z690 ace motherboard and have not encountered either issue I have listed above.

If ASUS manages to fix the ethernet lan problem then this board would be perfect, otherwise I cannot recommend it for the price they have listed it at. I have been a long time asus purchaser, both my 30 series GPU and my 1440p monitors are all ASUS.

However, I cannot in good conscience recommend their formula motherboard.

Since Ive gotten this motherboard it has been nothing but problems. I bought it to use thinking it was the latest and greatest from asus but since Ive had it, its been nothing but problems. The included fan controller is complete trash, it wont let me do anything with the fans or detect the fans half the time.

The aura lighting software is so buggy it causes my computer to crash half the time I try to set a solid color. I decided to remove all of asus software from my computer and now it seems stable but I cannot control the fans because the controller is controlled thru armory crate and Im stuck on rainbow puke.

My old Msi motherboard ram my gskill trident z5 6000mhz c36 ram perfectly with xmp but this 1100 motherboard cant even boot into windows half the time with xmp selected. Sorry for the rant but you should probably avoid this motherboard at all cost.

I am so disappointed with this motherboard.

I bought this motherboard to go into my NZXT H1, and I am very pleased with the results so far. It has a range of features that you don’t often find altogether on an ITX board, including a USB-C front panel header and a Thunderbolt 3 port.

It was the ideal board for this case as it matches the front I/O perfectly – USB C Gen 2 (10Gb/s), USB A Gen 1 (5Gb/s). It also has an excellent layout for the preset cable routes of the NZXT H1. I have found the VRMs very capable of overclocking my 10700K, and the m.

2 heatsink does the job with no issues whatsoever. The active VRM cooling from the fan in the rear I/O is a nice bonus, if generally unnecessary due to the high performance of the board anyway. If I were to pick faults or find areas of improvement, I would say the onboard Nahimic audio software is not the best I have experienced – though I suppose this is not an MSI problem in particular.

Equally, the placement of the onboard display inputs is on the far left of the board and is blocked by the bottom frame of the H1 – but again this is more of the case’s fault, and can obviously be avoided with some quick research and a different case.

This also will not apply if you’re planning to buy a dedicated GPU, so quite a niche problem. One suggestion for MSI (again quite niche) is I would like to see a future iteration without CNVi Wifi, so I can replace the provided Wifi Card with my own should I require.

Please do not let these nitpicks deter you from the board – it is excellent and if I were to go through every positive point this review would be far too long. Recommend (especially if you can get the cashback deal through MSI’s website!).

Just want to thank Microcenter first and foremost for getting me to type this review as I don’t think I would have figured this issue out otherwise. So MSI has this software called Dragon Center which can be used to control the RGB on your board and your CPU and case fans.

It also does some weird game boosting profile stuff but I never bothered with it; looked too sketchy. Been using it perfectly fine. However one day my internet speeds tank from a consistent 1Gbps to about 100-80 Mbps.

I had in no way correlated it with the installation of Dragon Center as the idea of the software capping my internet speeds for seemingly no reason was just insane to me. But it was. There is a LAN management mode in the software that is enabled by default and not only that but it installs another utility called cFosSpeed that also introduces a cap.

You must turn off LAN management mode and uninstall cFosSpeed using the windows Apps & Features settings menu to get your speeds back to normal. Absolutely wild. As for the board itself, its great. Having a CD rather than a USB stick with drivers on it is a bit awkward; especially at this price point.

But I’m happy with it overall. Just be careful when using Dragon Center, make sure its not doing something you don’t want it doing. If you just want to control your RGB without all the extra stuff look up their Mystic light software.

I went for a heavy MSI presence in my new build and the determining factor for that was this motherboard. The new Z490 series was definitely on my list but finding one with enough connections for all my drives, would support 128GB of RAM and give me all the USB connections I needed to run all my peripherals as I do a lot of streaming and audio/video editting.

Most other boards were offering 4 or 5 USB inputs (not counting case inputs) but this was one of the few boards I found that had 7 built right in and even had the type C already there. As for audio, my setup is based on optical input which not all motherboards have built in but this one does and the built in audio processing is pretty impressive and is why I’m holding off on a dedicated sound card for now as I feel quality is pretty on-par with a Soundblaster card and is great for gamers and the average audio/video production.

When it comes to LAN speeds, I’m really happy with the 1G and 2. 5G options on LAN inputs. The Godlike model goes higher than 2. 5G but for me, doubling the price wasn’t worth it for that feature and the few others.

That’s why while the ACE was a little above what I was looking to spend, I feel the extra dollars were worth it. It was very easy to install this board on the MSI Sekira 500X case I got to go with it.

Fits beautifully and really lets the Mystic Lights effects shine through when using this combo. I definitely would recommend this motherboard for anyone looking for an LGA 1200 socket for the new Intel 10th gen CPUs.

It definitely gives you what you pay for an a little more.

Comme d’habitude, MSI propose des produits à la qualité de fabrication irréprochable. Facile à monter, bien équipée avec un refroidisseur pour le SSD M.2. idéale combinée avec un Core i7 10700k

Super fonctionnalités, très performante et permet un très bon overclock .

This is the first time I have upgraded my PC in a very long time now, previously I had an i7 4770k and after so many years, in line with Nvidia’s new RTX 30-series cards, I decided it was finally time to save the pennies and upgrade the entire system.

Please understand that I’m not overly tech-savvy, I like to plug and play, with a little bit of tinkering here and there. It was for this reason that I chose the Z490 Tomahawk, after researching through ‘TechTubers’ (namely: Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed), the Tomahawk battled for the top when it came to performance and thermals for motherboards in this price region.

Additionally, thank you MSI for making it clear how many layers you use (being an Electronic Engineering student, this part sort of makes sense to me!). After receiving the product and setting it up, I can state that I am very happy with my purchase.

I’m not a fan of all the fancy RGB lighting (albeit, it does look very cool when well-utilised), and the simple yet striking monotone design of this board sold me on it, though you don’t really see it much once it’s installed (in my case, especially), it’s still nice to look at and appreciate.

Small bonus, thank you for not ditching the PS/2 port completely. I have 2 HDDs and 2 SSDs in my system, and I will be getting an M. 2 SSD in the near future, one thing I have to be careful of was a SATA port becoming disabled when the M2_1 and/or the M2_2 slots are occupied.

It’s a minor gripe and I don’t have the knowledge to understand why this happens, so I can’t really dock any points for that, it’s just a minor inconvenience which may only affect some. One thing I feel which is just a marketing scheme is the “PCIe Steel Armour” – I had a 980 Ti plugged into a basic PCIe port on my old Z87 board for 5 years and never saw a problem apart from GPU sag in the opposite corner to where it is plugged in.

Though I think it’s a just a marketing scheme, still a nice-to-have, right? 🙂 From my basic gaming/workstation standpoint, this product fits my needs well and I’ve encountered no issues thus far. I’m not an overclocker, well not a crazy one anyways, I like to tinker slightly with speeds, but I usually just like to revert and stay in the normal range.

If there’s any questions down the line with curiosity regarding my overclocking experience with the i9 10900k on this board, please feel free to ask! Overall, for the price I’m very happy with the result.

A lovely design, works well, not OTT and packed with features I wouldn’t use and spend extra money on, it just works. Very happy!.

After weeks of research and watching/reading reviews I opted for this board for my sons build. It came in the price range I was looking at. Very straight forward to install, BIOS is a dream to use. Plenty of outputs on the I/O and on the board itself, its a RGB dream, so many headers for fans.

The proven Frozr M2 shield, I could go on! Come Christmas day when my Son opens this up and starts using it, its miles ahead of what he is currently using. The addition of the extra 2. 5g LAN port too, super speed and No lag, I managed a download speed of 550 Mbps.

Overall after install everything was attached/installed without any issues at all, very very happy. Will 100% recommend this board to anyone who asks!.

Used with a 10700k CPU. From a selection of Z490 boards I’ve went the Tomahawk due to VRMs and easy setup. First time using MSI motherboard and I’m happy with my purchase, value for money ticked. Overclocking 10700k was made easy and with no issues.

If you’ve made your research you know what you are looking for and the lack of Wifi is easy to overlook considering the quality of the board. Glad I made the decision to get this one and would happily build another computer on this backbone again and can easily recommend to others.

MSI have impressed me and actually decided to chose them as my mobo for my next ITX build.

Not gonna lie wasn’t expecting much from this budget board. In the past I have compared MSI to a Wally world budget board. However this board has kind of changed my mind about MSI to be honest. This board booted without any issues has run stable with a mild overclock and I have had ZERO issues with any of it no firmware issues no software issues it just works.

It had all the features I expected to find on a motherboard and the placement was out of the park for cable management and let me tell you the one thing that just took the cake for me. This boards usb 3.

0 header had one for both side mount and straight into the board. I spent twice as much on my asus board and hate how the usb 3. 0 cable is managed because its up in the air while all my other cords are flat and tucked.

MSI really knocked it out of the park on the board if you ask me. Solid board for a good price couldn’t say enough good things.

Bought this to replace the same model I ordered elsewhere online. The other board (not this one) had a damaged CPU socket. This one was flawless. Built out with an Intel Core i7-10700K, 64GB RAM, and 1TB NVMe drive.

Ridiculously faster than ancient Dell Inspiron-530 it replaced! Not the ultimate build, but definitely hit the sweet spot for value. Overclocking automatically by specific app is dead simple using Dragon Center.

Great in Extreme Performance mode for doing heavy video editing, streaming with OBS, data modelling, or other CPU intensive work. The rest of the time, it stays in Silent mode. Great board for good performance that won’t break the bank.

Good luck with your builds. CPUs and GPUs are getting difficult to find, and the prices are going through the roof.

For the price this is a great motherboard. It provides basically everything needed for the current and next generation of PC Gaming, with a plethora of USB slots, audio connections, and an ethernet port.

The wifi works and I have yet to notice it dropping or anything. I had previously only worked on smaller motherboards, so having this one gave me much more room to work with then before which was nice.

I had been debating on this one or a few other MSI ones within the same price range, but ended up going with this since it had everything I wanted and was only a little bit more expensive than the MSI Tomahawk or Gaming Carbon.

Though the slots aren’t PCI-e 4, I don’t see much of an issue since those aren’t being used much yet and this isn’t one of the more high-level motherboards. The RGB isn’t super noticeable if you have a big GPU, but it is still nice to have.

Solid construction as well, and the manual inside helps when you get stuck putting everything together too.

ASUS have significantly over-designed the heatsink blocks around the CPU socket, making this board effectively incompatible with all but the most minimal air CPU coolers, and the major AIO/water blocks on offer too.

Beware when buying, check to make sure your cooler is compatible, then check again. Most sites are wrong, this thing can only take coolers with minimal footprints. This largely defeats the purpose of a high-end board, which you would pair with a high-end CPU in turn needing a large cooler.

ASUS have had this issue since the z390 but despite the 3 generations since are still choosing chunky aesthetic blocks rather than ensuring compatibility. Additionally, these boards have seen significant issues with their secondary m.

2 slot not being recognised by either the bios or Windows. Their first m. 2 slot is also improperly spaced, so that the “squishing” heatsinks don’t make full contact and instead bend your SSD. Overall there are a lot of issues with this board that you should no expect from a costly high-end product.

Steer clear.

No this is not a great value board. Not even close. But what I can say is that its robust, flawless, packed with features and you can force almost any modern AIO onto the socket. I saw many other people had various problems getting PCIe 5.

0/nvme drives/ memory working. I had exactly zero issues with this board everything worked for me out of the box with Trident Z5 6000 Mhz, Rocket4plus 2TB, a GTX 1080 and the 12900K. If you bought top shelf components then this is what you need.

I highly recommend performing the washer LGA 1700 ILM socket fix as it will net you around 5C+ lower temps on this board (tested with X63 Kraken with 12900K). You can actually feel the difference in heat transfer around the radiator after the washer fix.

I’m not liable for whatever you do to your board, but it does seem to me that the ILM washer fix was very easy to do and not that dangerous of an operation. So, if you’re on the fence and you have the screw driver with a star head and 4 washers from your AIO/case parts give it a shot.

Two downfalls to this board and one is fixable: 1) price 2) DDR5 6000 RAM and up won’t work with their specified XMP 3. 0 profiles yet They just spit out tons of memory errors in memtest. Hopefully a BIOS update will fix this in the near future.

4 stars because its overpriced but a no brainer for enthusiasts.

I’ve had nothing but issues with this board since I got it. Ironically, the bad Intel NIC everyone seems to have an issue with has been the most reliable thing on this board for me. The issues first came up a day after I installed the new MB in my system, when I was playing a game and my PC just shut off, without warning.

After 3 seconds it rebooted itself into Windows like nothing had happened. I thought that was odd and proceeded to try to game again, and it happened again. First thing I did was re-seat all my components.

I then ran a CPU stress test as well as MemTest86, and everything came out great. I then tried to game again and again, the PC simply shut off and rebooted after about 5 minutes of gameplay. Next thing I did was use a different PSU, thinking perhaps it was a power issue.

Installed the new PSU and again, the PC would shut off. After a few days, a new BIOS version came out and I immediately updated to it thinking that it may fix these instability issues I was having. but it unfortunately did not.

Now, after that update, I am having issues where the PC will shut itself off multiple times when started from a complete off. Watching the PC, it will start up and all the fans will be full blast, then it will run for 10 seconds and shut off, then after a few seconds it will restart.

After doing this cycle, the LED for the RAM will light up indicating an issue with the RAM. The only way to break that loop that has worked for me is to completely unplug the system, turn off the PSU, hold the power button to clear any residual electricity and then plug the PSU back in.

After I do that, the PC will start normally. My only conclusion is that the motherboard is faulty, as every component I have has been checked as well as ran in another system. The CPU works great, the PSU is brand new (tried 3 PSU’s in total) the RAM cleared MemTest86 as well as is on the QVL for the board AND worked great on an old Gigabyte board I use to test components, the SSD is fairly new and in good shape according to the Sandisk SSD health check and my GPU works flawlessly without issue.

That leaves the motherboard as the only piece that I can possibly think of that is having an issue, as I have checked all other components pretty thoroughly. the sad thing is, once it does start the PC will work fine while doing any task besides gaming, the whole reason I built it.

I can run stress test after stress test, brose the internet, watch movies, open 20 Chrome tabs, and not have an issue but once a gaming load happens the PC just says “nah, I’m out” and shuts off. Incredibly frustrating as my other Gigabyte B550 board has worked without issue for over a year now, absolutely flawless and now this, more expensive board, completely baffles me In fact, the only reason I got this board was because it’s one of the very rare white themed board, the other being the Gigabyte Vision D which is wayyy more expensive.

Starting to think I should have saved for it.

I am very please with this motherboard. I replaced an almost ten-year old Intel motherboard and didn’t have any major problems (except missed connecting my CD/DVD rom drives to the power supply). When I turned it on it scared me as it couldn’t find a boot drive.

Turns out you have to set the default boot method to legacy bios rather than UEFI in the bios setting to get it to recognize the boot drive. This is required if you are using an existing drive that is configured using legacy bios.

I don’t think this would be a problem if you are building a new computer and are using a brand new drive. The instructions could have provided more information on this. They are pretty much all pictures and don’t go into a lot of detail on the difference.

Once I had figured this out, the computer booted right up. Also, there is a bios update on the ASUS website but when I try to install it, it says that it’s not applicable to my motherboard. I haven’t figured out what’s going on with that.

Asus has always been a top quality product. The only reason I upgraded now was because of the required hardware specs. I have re-purposed my old system board into an older case as its now a server. The ASUS Sabertooth Z87 is still alive and going strong after nearly 8 years.

I don’t anticipate any issues from this one either. The ASUS TUF Z490 Gaming is a great board thus far. 1. Extremely easy to install. 2. Cable management is a BREEZE as the the board layout is intuitive.

3. BIOS settings are easy to navigate and change.

This motherboard is of a nice quality construction and packs a lot of features although some were disappointing. Armoury Crate being one and the poor performing WiFi another. Luckily I was a able to easily disable Aura features in the UEFI has it was slightly annoying when the PC was off.

The built in WiFi 6 would not get above 80 MBPS even connected to a WiFi 6 router with an excellent signal. The Bluetooth appears to be solid. Still not a bad board for the money.