ASUS ROG Strix Z590-E Gaming WiFi Review

Pricing and Conclusion

If the price tag of the ASUS Maximus XIII Hero was a little too rich for your blood, then you’ll be pleased to know that the latest addition to their wildly successful Strix range, the Z590-E, is right in the meat of the Z590 price bracket. Perhaps the thing that is most surprising about the £120 cheaper pricing of the Strix-E is how few features you seem to be losing.

Comparing it to its bigger brother, the Maximus, we have the same four M.2 slots split 50/50 between the new Intel addition of PCI Express 4.0 and the older PCI Express 3.0. We still find two 2.5G Ethernet ports, two PCI Express 4.0 GPU slots as well as a PCIe 3.0 one, plenty of USB 3.2 ports and no lack of fan headers. For 99% of users it has all the high bandwidth connectivity you’ll ever need, it just does it without such a hit to your wallet.

Available to purchase here: https://geni.us/Maximus_Hero_XIII

  

Peformance across all six of our Z590 motherboards has been broadly similar with none of them particularly standing out nor falling behind. In fact we’re pretty sure the ludicrous temperature that our Core i9-11900K hit answers the question we had about why the newest Core i9 has two fewer cores than the one that preceded it. This is, of course, entirely out of ASUS hands. The area they can control is the power stage and despite our Core i9 being thrashed to within an inch of its life the Strix-E barely broke into a sweat, which should be fantastic news for those of you who are looking to install a processor such as the Core i5-11600K into it and overclock the heck out of it instead of going with the new flagship 11th Gen.

About the only tiny negative we have is on the aesthetic side of things. Recently ASUS took to using a glitched Strix logo which was very unpleasant, and the new iteration is, if anything, even worse to look at. Instead of looking like the screen printer broke down halfway through you instead look like you need to lay off the sauce or get down to your optician. On a motherboard designed for turning on all the RGB lighting it’s a curious design choice. Maybe you don’t mind it.

The ASUS ROG Strix Z590-E Gaming WiFi continues the long established trend of the Strix hitting the price performance sweet spot, and we see no reason at all why this doesn’t fly off the shelves in the same quantities as its predecessors. It wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.

  

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