Review on Motherboard ASUS PRIME Z690-A by Michal Wojcik ᠌

Always tried to buy m / p ASUS TUF Gaming series. I consider them the "golden mean" in terms of price / quality / capabilities. But with a shortage in the component market, I faced a choice: either the relatively inexpensive PRIME or the overpriced ROG STRIX. I read a review on PRIME, the component base is of high quality, the layout is convenient, there are standard heatsinks for the M2 SSD, there are no particular shortcomings, so I chose it. Already after the purchase, I learned from the manager that in the ROG series there was a defective batch with incorrectly soldered batteries, which killed the CPU (and ASUS admitted this)! PRIME was not seen in anything like that) This m/n has two 8-pin power connectors for the CPU, make sure you have the second resp. power cable to PSU! The first minus was discovered during assembly - this model does not have a 19-pin connector for connecting external USB 3.0 connectors, there are only standard 9-pin ones. He was present at the old m / n TUF Z370. But this model has a better built-in sound processor than the Z370. However, with a proprietary driver, there is no "improvements" tab in the device settings and there is no way to enable loudness. But the overall volume level is higher than in the previous m / n, so it's not critical. The second surprise was when I went into the UEFI BIOS - I did not find an ate item via the Internet in it! It was on all previous m / n ASUS. Maybe this is the "initial" level of PRIME? Even with the railway, I did not want to ate, it only happened from a flash drive. In general, there are so many different incomprehensible settings in this BIOS, incl. related to overclocking, which you can probably study for a month. Very confusing descriptions, it is difficult to understand right away, this is a minus. Special praise deserves proprietary software for Windows - Armory Crate. The OS itself offered to download and install it when it identified new hardware. A very convenient and informative control and monitoring center, you can also install and ate drivers and utilities from it. Definitely a step forward compared to AI Suite 3. In general, I am satisfied with the m / n, I can recommend it as a budget option.