Intel 12th Gen DDR4 vs DDR5 With ASUS Z690 Plus TUF Gaming D4
Up Close – In Detail
The TUF is the first of our Z690 motherboards to have an 8+4 12V power input rather than 8+8. Maybe this is a side effect of using DDR4, or perhaps they just don’t expect people to overclock this quite as hard.
At the top we have a pair of fan headers. It’s nearly always the first thing to get reduced on affordable motherboards, but we’ve never understood why. It’s not as if a fan header and a tiny bit of copper PCB trace costs the earth. Give us all the cooling please! Further along we have the RGB and ARGB pair for your upper half lighting fun and games.
Moving down the 7 segment displays common on other motherboards have been replaced with indicator LEDs. Anything that saves a few pence has to be good, and how often do you look at your QLED error codes anyway? Mine says A0 all the time and manuals never tell you what each code means. Might as well go for a cost-effective LED.
Although affordable the TUF doesn’t stop you having front panel USB Type-C alongside the Type-A. There are just a pair of SATA ports here, with more around the corner which we’ll get to in a moment.
The bottom right corner has all the usual connectors, front panel, USB 2.0 and, in this case somewhat oddly two vertical SATA ports. We don’t think it would save money to not have them in the usual spot. Surrounding those are two more fan headers for drawing in cool air.
Beneath the heatspreaders you can see the many M.2 slots available to you on the TUF Gaming Z690-Plus D4. It’s good to see the market transitioning to more M.2s as the price of them has fallen to barely above a regular SSD now.
The bottom left corner rounds things off with the other two AURA headers along with another fan header and a COM port, should you have some technology from the 90s you can’t let go of.
Around the back things aren’t as reduced as you might expect from an affordable motherboard. You get a DisplayPort and HDMI port, USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C, 2 USB 3.2G2 Type-A ports and 4 G1s, as well as a 3.2G1 Type-C. Add to that the WiFi 6 and 2.5G LAN and the Z690 take on the TUF formula has a much higher level of connectivity than the older models. Excellent.
