The Biostar Z690A Valkyrie:
The bundle:
A little tour through the bundle of this Biostar Z690A Valkyrie to see if its bundle is well supplied. Without surprise, we find something quite standard, SATA cables, manual, CD and a smart connector. A rather minimalist bundle considering its price.
The architecture:
The Z690 chipset officially supports PCIe 5.0 offering higher storage performance than the previous generation. However, at the moment there are no components that support this standard. The other big change is the support of DDR5, although here we stay on DDR4.
The different radiators:
The dimensions of the board are 305 mm x 244 mm, which corresponds to the ATX format. The dominant colors on the PCB are black and gray. We will find some RGB lighting on the chipset and VRMs.
Let’s start the tour with the radiators, of which there are 5. First of all, we have the radiators located on the top of the motherboard and covering the power stages. These radiators have two fans each and are composed of fins.
The other heat sinks are for the M.2 SSD slots, the entire PCIe area is covered with them and they are divided into three parts. 
As far as rigidity is concerned, this Z690A Valkyrie does a great job thanks to the backplate and the SSD heat sinks that stiffen the whole thing. 
Four m.2 SSD slots :
We start with the M.2 slot connected to the CPU in 4.0 which is placed above the first PCIe slot. The latter is cooled by a passive radiator. Then we have two M.2 slots in PCIe 4.0 between the PCIe slots and a last 4.0 at the bottom of the motherboard. Finally comes the M.2 slot for the WI-FI / Bluetooth card located in the extension of the first M.2 slot.
Technically, there are three PCIe 4.0 x4 slots and one PCIe 3.0 x4/SATA. You shouldn’t miss any storage slot. The SATA is well supplied with eight slots.
The socket and PCIe :
The space around the socket is quite crowded, especially on the upper part of the socket. This can cause incompatibilities with some cooling that could hit the capacitors. The VRM heat sinks are spaced far enough from the socket to allow for cooling systems to be put in place.
This Z690A Valkyrie supports dual channel DDR4 memory kits up to 5000 MHz+ (OC) and for a maximum amount of 128 GB. There are two PCIe 5.0 16x slots that will work in x16/x8. The last X16 slot is wired in X4 on the Z690 chipset.
To power all this little world, the card has a 24 pins connector and 8+8 pins next to the power stages.
