Asus PRIME Z790M-PLUS DDR4 (90MB1D20-M0EAY0)

A miniature micro-ATX motherboard, which, unlike most of its counterparts in the Prime family, is focused on assembling moderately powerful and compact PCs in Desktop or Cube Case cases. It belongs to the middle price segment, in the Asus hierarchy it occupies an intermediate position, inferior in capabilities to profile gaming devices from the TUF and ROG series. According to the manufacturer, its target audience are gamers and specialized professionals who seek to hide great power in a small box.

The model is based on the flagship Intel Z790 system logic, which is more commonly seen in ROG STRIX models. It is equipped with an Intel LGA 1700 processor socket that supports only 12th and 13th generation Intel APUs (Alder Lake and Raptor Lake). The Asus PRIME Z790M-PLUS DDR4 processor is powered by a fairly high-quality 11-phase power subsystem, the efficiency of which is enough to overclock a conditional Core i5 or Core i7.

There may be problems with more serious chips. As is customary in the Prime series, the manufacturer focuses on the use of durable textolite, additional cooling of power circuits, strengthening slots and other things that extend the life of the device. In parallel, Asus is promoting it as the optimal solution for a gaming PC with a Full HD or 2K monitor. In particular, it is friendly with many overclocking tools (AI Cooling II, XMP 3.0, OptiMem II and Asus AEMP II), and also supports the installation of RGB / ARGB tapes and water cooling.

The available 4 DIMM slots allow you to assemble a serious set of RAM on its base with a maximum volume of up to 128 GB. And support for the PCI-E 4.0 data bus gives you a free hand when using reactive M.2 SSD drives. The board layout provides 2 M.2 ports for installing high-speed NVMe SSDs. The presence of 6 SATA3 slots makes it possible to organize a high-speed RAID array with a large amount of storage on the basis of the board. In addition, the board is equipped with a gigabit network controller from Intel and a Wi-Fi 6 + Bluetooth v 5.2 wireless module.