ASUS ROG Z690 Strix-A D4 Review

Conclusion

One of the occasional problems we encounter when wrapping up our review of something is the right wording. Looking through the results of the ASUS Z690 Strix-A D4 the word that comes most easily to mind is inconsistent. The stock results are either fantastic or bad, the single threaded stuff scores highly but the multithreaded doesn’t. The AI OC is even more impressive on single threaded benchmarks but at the cost of all other considerations. So it’s inconsistent. However, it is only inconsistent when compared against itself. As regular readers will know the modern chipsets and architectures are so good that the gaps between the very finest and the, relatively, worst, are so tiny as to almost be not worthy of consideration. The Strix-A is no different. Even the times it’s sitting near the foot of our graphs it’s by no means disgraced.

What does this mean for the consumer then?

Primarily the first consideration is whether you really want a DDR4 motherboard. This could be budgetary reasons – upgrading from your current rig or just not wanting to be gouged by early-adopter DDR5 price tags. It could be because in these early days of DDR5 and the late days of DDR4, there isn’t as much difference in performance as there might be in a year or mores time. The lower latency of the DDR4 currently, in real-world benchmarks, makes up the difference in raw throughput of which the DDR5 is capable. If you do, then the Strix-A offers up one of the few Z690 motherboards that supports the older memory format. You also gain all the kudos and features one has come to expect from a product that flies beneath the ASUS Republic Of Gamers banner, even if it isn’t quite up there with their higher end Maximus models. Why you choose the Strix-A is up to your exact requirements, but if you do pick it, there is some stuff of which you have to be aware.

As we saw from our testing the AI Overclocking, and manual overclocking seems to be designed to make the most of a few of the cores on our Core i9-12900K, rather that going all in on the multicore clock speeds, and this can be good or bad depending upon your use case. Certainly if you primarily use applications which prefer one or two cores to be blisteringly fast then you’ll be delighted. Gaming performance in particular is a huge highlight of the Strix abilities and if you’re planning a gaming system you could almost stop reading right here. High core tasks are a small weakness of the Strix and there are better options available. Certainly if that is your métier then you’ll have to invest some time in overclocking the Strix-A, as the stock performance leaves something to be desired. With the aforementioned caveat that good and bad are hugely relative terms.

The ASUS ROG Z690 Strix-A D4 isn’t a motherboard that you’ll get the best from if you plan to just build your rig and leave it alone. It won’t disappoint by any measure, but you owe it to yourself to delve into the easy-to-use UEFI and manually fettle it. You could use the AI Overclocking but right now we dont really see the benefits of using this.. For gamers though the Strix-A is a magnificent option and wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.

  

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