ASUS ProArt Creator 10G Review

Conclusion

The very nature of motherboards has changed a lot since we’ve been doing this, with more and more of the control for USB ports and SATA ports etc placed under the stewardship of the chipset which has meant a lot of motherboards come with very similar features. When you add into this the market’s voracious appetite for RGB lighting and all black colour schemes tends to lead to a lot of designs which, to the layperson, blend together. It’s not always easy to tell at a glance what a particular motherboard is without the manufacturer stamping their logo in a huge, multi-hued number on IO section/heatsink combo.

The ASUS ProArt Creator 10G has no such issues. It looks like little else. The heatsinks, both for the power section and the chipset/M.2, remind us of the sort of heatsinks you used to get many years ago when their design was utilitarian rather than swoopy and eye-catching. It looks, dare we say it, a little plain. How much this bothers you is a matter of personal preference and there are surely just as many people who gnash their teeth at the endless parade of Jean-Michel Jarré aping offferings as love them. If you wish your motherboard was more understated then the ProArt Creator might be right up your street.

We might have looked at the single 8pin CPU 12V input and meagre heatsinks and worried that the Creator wouldn’t quite be upto par in the overclocking stakes, but the reality was that we got the usual 5.2 GHz overclock on all ten cores of our Core i9-10900K. Creation and editing is a very CPU intensive process and any lack of performance here would put the ProArt Creator dead on arrival, but thankfully it might not look like the most high performance motherboard on earth but definitely gets the job done as you could see throughout our testing. The lack of bells and whistles also has an effect upon the price too. It’s not the cheapest we’ve seen, but the addional Thunderbolt/DisplayPort In options don’t jack up the price to flagship level, whilst being unique to this particular board.

  

We think it’s fair to say the ProArt Creator is the most Bauhasian motherboard we’ve seen in a long while. It has no flair, no flashy bits, no extraneous features, and does enough to differentiate it from the massive selection of Z490 motherboards currently available. If you’re wanting something a little out of the ordinary then the ASUS Z490 ProArt Creator 10G has a lot to offer at an affordable price.

  

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