ASUS ROG Strix Z490-E Preview

Clockwise Tour

We enjoy this way of showing off the board. We could just show the top and bottom pictures from the previous page and then give you a wall of text, but when the attention is focussed so completely upon each bit you can get a better feel for the product without suffering information overload. The power inputs for the Strix-E are in 4+8 format, rather than the 8+8 we saw on the Maximus XII Extreme. You'll also spot a fan header just sitting alongside them.

As we move around you can glimpse the top, heavily grooved, heatsink for the power section. Next to that are the two headers for your CPU cooler, followed swiftly by RGB and Addressable headers.

Continuing around we have front panel USB headers in both USB 3.2 Gen2 and USB 3.1 flavours. Bad luck if you've got a chassis with more than two front USB ports, although this is hardly a problem unique to the Strix-E.

Moving a little further down we find six SATA 6Gbps ports ready to accept your huge collection of storage drives. You can also see the fine detail of the chipset heatsink. Very nice. We'll show it lit up in a moment.

At the bottom edge there is a large selection of headers, from the front panel, through case fans, water pump headers, M.2 fan and the internal USB 2.0 ports that once were ignored but are now vital in all of our RGB controllers.

Reaching the bottom left corner we find the Q-Code display next to further RGB and Addressable headers, sitting alongside the Supreme FX S1220A audio. No ASUS Node header so far. Hmm.

Around the back there are HDMI and DisplayPort outputs for those of you running without a GPU, a 2.5G Intel LAN header, WiFi 6 with Bluetooth support, 4 USB 3.2 Gen2 ports (3 Type-A and one Type-C) as well as 2 Type A USB 3.2 Gen1 ports and four USB 2.0, with the audio jacks in their usual place.