ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Apex Preview
Up Close
We have seen a lot of usually white motherboards moving towards silver lately, or just generally reducing exactly how serious they are about the white look. The Apex, on the other hand, goes all in with even a white PCB. Guaranteed to keep the bossman happy.
Bits of it are still silver though, such as the enormous heatsinks that keep the power stages cool. More on those later.
For now just focus upon the many different textures and designs on the Apex. Some might call it fussy, but we’re big fans of some effort being put in to the design, particularly at this eye-opening price point.
Starting as always at the top left and we find two braced 12V ATX power inputs alongside one of the many high Watt fan/pump headers available to you on the Apex.
Moving along we have two headers for the CPU fan and pump, as well as a dedicated AIO pump header on the top right hand corner. Between those are two Addressable RGB headers, one vertical one horizontal.
As a motherboard designed very much for the hardcore overclockers, the Apex has voltage monitoring points, onboard BCLK adjustment, OC Retry button, RSVD switch to help boot when using exotic sub-zero cooling solutions and our favourite button, the pause button. This halts the whole system, letting you fine tune an overclock in the middle of a run. Less scrupulous people might pause mid-benchmark to help things cool down, but it’s also usable as way to top up your DICE pot without having to abort your run. Nice.
USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 front panel Type-C is ALL the bandwidth, should you so require it. You can also see the super-useful PCI release latch, particularly with the size of some of the most recent graphics cards. Our fingers aren’t as thing as chopsticks so it helps a lot.
