Review on 💥 ROG Strix Z590-A Gaming WiFi 6 LGA 1200 Intel 11th/10th Gen ATX White Gaming Motherboard with PCIe 4.0, 14+2 Power Stages, WiFi 6, Intel 2.5 Gb LAN, Thunderbolt 4, 3X M.2/NVMe SSD, and Aura RGB by Rico Dantzler

This is my fourth build with the ASUS Zx90-A mobo. I previously had an i5-8600K paired with PRIME Z370-A, i9-9900K and i5-9600K on PRIME Z390-A boards. All Intel, all without problems. I wanted a white themed board and wasn't thrilled with Gigabyte Vision D BIOS support/updates, WRT Thunderbolt support, so I chose ROG Strix Z590-A paired with i5-11600K, ID-Cooling ZoomFlow Snow 360, 3 x 3 Pack Lian Li SL120 and EVGA 3080 FTW UG added to O11 Dynamic. 4JnHMv in the PC parts selector if you want full details. In any case, everything is fine. I'm using 1 x PCIe 4.0 M.2 EVO 980 Pro and 1 x EVO 970. I like the small M.2 drive clips but I'm wondering why they can't configure the PCIe 4.0 slot to accept it too (it interferes with the installation of -for the height and increased length of the heatsink). I also appreciate that they moved the nasty USB 3.0 connector off the bottom edge of the board and away from the bottom fans/heatsinks. The built-in I/O board is good, plenty of fans, RGB and ARGB connectors and everything is well integrated into one logic circuit. The ASUS UEFI BIOS is good enough to keep buying ASUS boards even after what happened to this one. (First of all.) I had Win 10 on a flash drive, a fresh 980 Pro and everything got up the first time, the ethernet connection drivers are preinstalled on the board, Windows does its job and after another 15-20 minutes it's done Reboots and the updates were good to start the update. The Armor Crate utility is somewhat iffy. It has AuraSync buttons that take you to a webpage that asks you to download Armor Crate. Yay for recursiveness. It also "verifies" installing software you haven't already installed, so be careful or you'll end up with Norton on your computer. I also noticed that it recommends updating my BIOS to a version after the one that came with it. but it wasn't the latest version. I also recommend that if you use it (you can turn it off in the BIOS on the TOOLS page in the advanced settings, by the way), that you wait until Windows Update is 100% complete before running it for the first time. Then there is less fighting between them about who installs which update and not another. So now the disappointing moment. 48 hours after the ethernet controller was powered on for the first time, suddenly no driver was connected to it. It showed up under "Other Devices" as "Ethernet Controllers" but Intel Driver Utility couldn't find any Intel Ethernet controllers to install the driver and ASUS Driver Utility failed with no detailed error messages (actually any error messages). Running the devcon.exe command for the two device IDs that the Intel driver uses. Ironically, I *could* install the wrong Intel driver and the system knew it was the wrong driver, but I couldn't install the correct driver. In the end it turned out that the PCI Express root port #19 - 43C2 somehow failed at the hardware level. Very, very strange. I'm in the "business" and have seen many different hardware, software, and firmware failures, but never this particular one. Who knows, maybe it was an unfortunate update of a firmware or BIOS, but most likely just bad luck. On the bright side, almost 100% of network issues on the ROG forums are related to WiFi, and it works flawlessly. All other ports are checked. Enabling a customizable bar was actually easy (from a mobile perspective). Just select "Resizable BAR" in the BIOS (even at the top of the screen in EzMode) and enable it or turn it on or w/e. Boom. Well, "boom" after updating the EVGA firmware. And Nvidia drivers. And activate it in Precision X1. (Not specific to this mobo, but the PX1 at least has a 5-step checklist to enable it - fix the OS, GPU, VBIOS, driver, and mobo.) Overall tech support was fine. I'm not sure the level 1 folks understood exactly what steps I took to fix the ethernet controller issue, or how painful all the reboots, rollbacks, etc. were. But they offered to either return the board or if I had more return time it was recommended that I just send it back to Revain for a replacement. white or just choose -E and create some contrast as the GPU is already black and the grommets and cutouts in the O11 D are black and for some reason the white SL120 Lian Li fans have black shrouded connectors. BL: I would buy another ASUS board. I will be buying another ASUS board but not sure if it will be this one for fear that the sequence I installed and updated will run again and lock up the ethernet controller - unless it was just one unfortunate HW bug.