This week, thanks to VideoCardz, we can lay our eyes on a number of ASUS Z890 motherboards. From the Maximus Extreme and Hero to the TUF Gaming series and the entry-level Prime, we’ve got it all!
ASUS Z890: the new Maximus!
As usual, ASUS is letting loose with the Extreme, with a card in E-ATX format. The latter seems to benefit from a massive display in the I/O area. Likewise, the company is taking care of the VRM ‘s heat dissipation with, visibly, double C-shaped heat pipes. Otherwise, some of the connectors are at 90°, such as the 24-pin ATX, the SATA section and the USB 3.0 headers. Finally, there is a button for booting out of the case, as well as a number of selectors at the bottom of the PCB, probably linked to overclocking.
The Hero, for its part, retains a similar design to the Extreme, but benefits from a standard ATX format. While the debug LED and start buttons are found outside the case, it is not as complete in terms of functionality. Here, we notice the presence of an additional 8-pin PCIe (also present on the Extreme) positioned under the 24-pin to give a little more juice to the PCIe like on the MSI cards.
The Strix -A and -E:
With the Strix series, we’re back to neat boards offering a good basis for building high-performance machines. As you can see, the brand has renewed its -A model with a predominantly white colour scheme, while the -E is black.
In any case, the memory and PCIe connections are similar. As far as the SSDs are concerned, we can guess four or five slots, with the first slot in PCIe 5.0.
However, the Strix -E seems to be more feature-rich, with a debug LED and more USB headers .
The new TUF Gaming Z890-Plus WiFi :
With this new TUF Gaming range, ASUS is offering us a card with a military look . The VRM heatsinks are particularly well designed, especially for the I/O shield. Otherwise, there’s a large number of PCIe slots, with the first slot being x16, followed by two x1 3.0 slots and one x4 slot. At the very bottom, we have a final x16 slot, which is certainly not wired in x16.
Finally, for storage, we can guess three M.2 slots from the various heatsinks present. Otherwise, there are four SATA III slots. For memory, ASUS has put forward four DIMM slots.
The entry-level Prime series:
Finally, we’ve learned of the existence of two motherboards from the Prime series with ATX and micro-ATX versions. Once again, white heatsinks and a black PCB provide a nice contrast. However, what really catches our eye here is the number of PCIe x16 slots present on these models: 4 for each reference! But make no mistake, they won’t be running in x16 (except for the first slot), and the others will at best be wired in x8.
Obviously, with so many PCIe slots on a micro-ATX card, there are only two M.2 slots, one under the socket, the other under the chipset. However, this low number is offset by six SATA slots. On the Prime-P, there will be one more M.2 and four SATA III.