It’s An ROG Round Up! Three Z590 Motherboards In Fierce Competition

Three Premium ASUS Intel Motherboards Face Off

If you are shopping for a new motherboard for that fancy Rocket Lake CPU you just picked up, a trip to KitGuru might be a good idea.  They have just posted a comparison of the mini-ITX ROG STRIX Z590-I Gaming WiF, and the full ATX ROG STRIX Z590-E Gaming WiFi and Maximus XIII Hero.  That provides a variety of implementations of Z590 from SFF to mid range to high end, and could help make your decision about what you should be pricing out.

All three motherboards were tested with a Core i9-11900K, 32GB DDR4-3600MHz, RTX 3080 and a WD Black SN750, the only big difference was ASUS’ Adaptive Boost.  It seems that trying to use both XMP memory settings and Adaptive Boost at the same time is a bit problematic.  ASUS is currently working on a BIOS update to resolve this, but this is the reason only the STRIX Z590-E Gaming WiFi has both Boost on and Boost off results.   This is rather disappointing as the setting does have a noticeable effect on performance.

Looking at the Boost off results, the performance of the three motherboards is essentially the same.  There are slight differences but not noticeable ones and for the most part fall within the margin of error that exists in these tests.  That makes the features available on each of the boards the main deal maker or breaker and KitGuru breaks it all down for you in their review.