ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero (WiFi 6E) LGA 1700(Intel®13th&12th Gen) ATX Gaming Motherboard(PCIe 5.0,DDR5,20+1power Stages,2.5Gb LAN, Bluetooth V5.2,2X Thunderbolt 4 Ports,5xM.2, Thunderbolt™ 4/USB4)

likes its got it all cons cost

*Submitted Based on Warranty Extension for Review Feedback, Score Not Based On Incentive

I have stuck with ASUS for every build. I did because of their reliability - until now. I have a lot of experience building systems. I tried every trick I could think of to get this unit working: updated the BIOS and all the other items, like chipset updates, tried different variations of known good hardware, switched out the DRAM modules in different configurations, et. al., but nothing worked. All the hardware met ASUS compatibilty lists.

Once installed works amazing, but the manual and instructions are not intuitive at all. Was unable to get the computer to post to find out that every power connector needs to be plugged into the motherboard from the psu, however this is not mentioned anywhere in the manual. Once that was figured out, the motherboard has been performing excellent.

I upgraded my PC from a Z590 Hero to this Z790 Hero, and I couldnt be more pleased... except for the lack of broad DDR 5 memory support. I tried a 4-stick 128GB Kingston DDR 5 Kit that was supposedly supported but found it very unstable. I fell back to a 2-stick 64GB Corsair kit that has been rock-solid.

This board is garbage, for the sole fact that it will never be able to run a gen 5 ssd, why? Because it only supports a gen 5 in the hypercard in the 2nd pcie slot, but with todays thick GPUs that slot is covered completely by the GPU.

This POS motherboard destroyed 2 sets of ram I purchased and another set of ram i borrowed from a friend. there was some serious voltage instability. i was able to get it running after limiting my ddr5 ram to 4800 from the 5600 i borrowed. but just today it became unstable again. however it will still pass memtest86 now so it is 100% a MB issue. ASUS has gaslit me over the past month and i will never purchase another MB from them again. its just not worth the trouble.

I had all sorts of issues with 128GB of ram initially, but eventually got it all working.

Bought this as soon as the Raptor Lake CPUs launched, so I put my new i9-13900 in this unit. Its the same shape and board layout as the Z690 model of this board, so the waterblocks and other things for the Z690 Hero seem to fit this board without any fuss. I cant guarantee that for *all* items, but the EKWB waterblock I had, for example, moved over and had no clearance issues at all.

Very Good