ASRock Z690 AQUA

ASRock's flagship motherboard features an LGA 1700 CPU socket, high-end power supply, advanced overclocking tools and an integrated water block for CPU and VRM cooling. Hidden under the water block are 19+1 VRM phases with powerful 105 A MOSFETs, capable of withstanding a total VCore load of almost 2000 A. In addition, the manufacturer has added many built-in buttons and switches to facilitate overclocking.

All this suggests that this is an extremely powerful and expensive motherboard for overclocking enthusiasts, designed to compete with the Hi-End boards ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme Glacial, Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce and MSI MEG Z690 Godlike. Optimal use cases, according to the manufacturer, are elite gaming PCs designed for 4K and test systems ready to break records in benchmarks.

In particular, it was on the basis of this board that the flagship Intel Core i9-12900K processor set five world performance records in the Geekbench, Cinebench and PiFast tests. ASRock Z690 AQUA runs on the flagship Z690 system logic, and for installing the processor it is equipped with a modern Intel LGA 1700 socket, which is compatible with all the latest lines of Intel Core processors, including the Alder Lake, Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh families.

The device layout includes 11 slots for connecting drives (8 SATA3 + 3 M.2 with PCIe 4.0 bus support) and several reinforced PCIe slots for video cards (Crossfire mode). To connect RAM, there are 4 DIMM slots that support installation of up to 192 GB of new generation DDR5 memory with a maximum frequency of 6400 MHz. A dual network controller (Marvell AQC113CS and Killer E3100G) with a total throughput of 12.5 Gbps and a built-in wireless receiver supporting Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth is responsible for processing game traffic.

For high-quality sound output, the ALC1220 audio subsystem with support for virtual multi-channel audio and a separate optical output is used. Additional bonuses up the sleeve of the device are built-in USB 4 connectors with support for the Thunderbolt interface, support for ASRock Polychrome Sync lighting, as well as numerous connectors and pads for placing liquid cooling and RGB strips.