ASUS TUF Z790-Plus WiFi Gaming Motherboard

This is an excellent and very practical motherboard, suitable for both gaming and everyday tasks. While it may not have a PCIe 5.0 x4 slot for an M.2 SSD, it does have a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot for graphics cards and other expansion cards. Since it was released before WiFi 7, it still has WiFi 6E, but since WiFi 7 and PCIe 5.0 SSD’s are both very recent with very few devices on the market that can actually use these technologies, these trade-offs have very little impact. The included heatsinks for 3 of the 4 M.2 SSD slots are excellent. I have yet to see my SSD’s rise above 32 degrees Celsius, even when gaming. It would have been nice if this model came with a Thunderbolt 4 port on the rear I/O panel, but they have to make extra money somehow. The motherboard includes a Thunderbolt 4 header and an extra USB 2.0 port to allow for one of their Thunderbolt 4 expansion cards. At least using one of these expansion cards in the second PCIe 4.0 x16 slot doesn’t affect the bandwidth of the other expansion slots, but using a Hyper M.2 expansion card in the PCIe 5.0 slot causes the first PCIe 4.0 x16 slot to drop to x8 bandwidth and the second slot to drop to x4 bandwidth. With 4 M.2 slots though, there really isn’t a reason to use one of the Hyper M.2 cards unless you feel you absolutely need a PCIe 5.0 SSD. Similarly, there isn’t really any need for a Thunderbolt 4 expansion unless you need a DP-capable USB-C port or USB data transfer speeds of 40Gbps. The rear I/O panel provides plenty of USB ports as it is, ranging from 5 Gbps USB Type A to 20 Gbps USB-C. With this motherboard, I use an i7-13700K CPU and Intel XMP RAM that can go up to the processor’s maximum 5600 MHz. Thanks to ASUS Ai Suite III, I was able to set up a stable OC profile with the CPU running at an average of 4800 MHz reaching up to 5900 MHz on the P-cores, and with the memory frequency set to the advertised 5600 MHz. However, since Ai Suite III requires Memory Integrity to be disabled, I followed the advice of someone on a forum and re-enabled Memory Integrity after disabling Run at Startup for Ai Suite. Thanks to that advice, I now have ASUS’ AI overclock working with Memory Integrity enabled. I have updated the BIOS regularly without issue, keeping my overclock settings by saving a BIOS profile .CAP file to a USB drive before updating. After the update, I just load the profile and everything goes back to how it was. The Q-Slot has made removing my GPU so much easier. This is important because the only M.2 slot that doesn’t have a heatsink gets covered by the GPU when it’s placed in the PCIe 5.0 slot or the first PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. I briefly tried placing one of my SSD’s in that M.2 slot, but I ended up moving it to a different slot because, as expected, the SSD got much hotter underneath the GPU than in one of the slots covered by a heatsink. If you want to use that slot, I would recommend getting an effective low-profile SSD heatsink. The Q-LED’s have been very helpful with troubleshooting issues at startup. For example, the GPU LED kept coming on during startup for some time. After trying a few things, I discovered that Windows kept forcing the CPU to use its onboard graphics during startup, even if I had the onboard graphics disabled in BIOS, which is why the splash screen that allows you to enter BIOS at startup as well as the Windows loading screen never appeared through my GPU output. Thankfully, my monitor has several input ports, so I was able to connect both the onboard graphics and the GPU to my monitor, set the GPU output as the main display, and now I no longer have this issue. This really is a great motherboard, and I would buy it again. I just hope they make an equivalent of this motherboard in the future with the new BTF layout that ASUS announced so when I need a new motherboard 8 years from now, I can get the same kind of practical gaming motherboard for the BTF PC that I will inevitably build.

Amazing motherboard, I upgraded from a prebuilt mobo to this one, and it is perfect, as it has aura rgb lightning, a lot fan ports and it is very good quality product. I can recommend this motherboard as it not very expensive and does its job very good.

4.5 – I can’t complain, this install was easy, yet there is one hiccup. No LAN or WIFI found during Windows 11 Pro fresh install. Solution: When at the screen shift+F10, type in the command prompt OOBE\BYPASSNRO and hit enter. I have read some install the drivers prior to this step, but I found this was easier. Windows 11 will continue on its own.

There are plenty of RAM choices to match with the board and Asus support page is excellent for finding a CPU and RAM for this board.

Make sure you install the Asus Armoury crate as well, there were quite a few updates that will clear up your Device Manager.

I haven’t tried overclocking the CPU yet, but the XMP1 profile is working fine and I haven’t had any crashes running any games.

Disclosure: This review, in part, is for the extended 90 day warranty available through Asus.

Awesome. Mobo, has all the required ports and so many thing you can add to this motherboard