ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Formula Review

Test Setup

With an entirely new platform we've taken the opportunity to update our test system to include Windows 11. We've also got some DDR5 from Corsair in the form of the Dominator Platinum. Plenty of scope to make the new 12th Generation Intel CPUs perform to their best.

ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Formula
Intel Core i9-12900K
32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR5
Windows 11 64bit
Sabrent 4TB Rocket Plus
Nvidia RTX 2080Ti
Corsair AX1600i
Corsair H150i with Noctua 3000 RPM fans

Clock Speeds

The Formula offers up AI Overclocking as we saw on the Strix D4 we reviewed, although thankfully it doesn't push quite as hard as it did on that one. If you recall the Strix was tuned to overclock the single thread to insane speeds, but at the expense of multicore performance. The Formula backs off on the single thread - although still heavily angled in that direction - and thus has better multicore abilities.

For our manual overclock we did get all of the Pcores running at 5.2ghz and all of the E's running at 4.1ghz so that is 100mhz extra on both compared to the Strix D4. If you matched the two boards clock for clock strangely the Formula was slow but did just manage to pull ahead when it had the clock speed advantage.