The black heatsinks attached to the VRMs are beefy and look as though they would do well to dissipate some heat.

It's actually subtle on the ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero and is only present within that mirror plate on the I/O shroud - it looks pretty good. ROG Hyper M.2 expansion card (1x M.2 2242/2260/2280 (PCIe 4.0, SATA)Īnd this wouldn't be an ASUS motherboard without some RGB lighting. Both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs can be configured into a dual-GPU configuration.Ĥx DDR5 DIMM (up to DDR5-6400+), 128GB limitĢx M.2 2242/2260/2280 (PCIe 4.0 x4, SATA) There are three full-size x16 PCIe slots with two at 5.0, and one additional slot at 4.0. It's capable of handling up to 128GB of DDR5 RAM at speeds of up to 6.4GHz (3.2GHz x2). Since this is a Z690 motherboard, there's full support for 12th Gen Intel processors. There's also a USB drive that can be used for storing UEFI BIOS updates or other files, an antenna for Wi-Fi 6E, and various cables for hooking up other components inside the PC. The ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero is one good-looking motherboard.Īlong with the board inside the packaging, you'll find an M.2 PCIe card that offers one PCIe 5.0 and one PCIe 4.0 slot. The ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero is one good-looking motherboard. It's an all-black PCB with a mirror finish plate atop the I/O shroud. The ROG Maximus Z690 Hero is no exception. So, pay attention to relative differences rather than the exact numbers.ASUS motherboards generally sport clean designs with little aggressive styling, at least compared to other brands with their 'gamer' themes. For instance, it is entirely possible that your CPU, even at factory settings, runs at a slightly lower or higher base frequency than the ones you find online. One final thing before we move on, no two CPUs or GPUs are identical even if they have the same model number. Therefore, if you want to know whether your CPU or GPU is overclocked, you need to know the maximum frequency they operate at and compare the numbers to stock chips. So, overclocking primarily increases the frequency or clock speed at which the chips operate. But if you have an adequate cooling setup, you can increase the maximum clock frequency of the chip closer to 6 GHz. For instance, an Intel i9-10900K has a base clock frequency of 3.70 GHz and a boost clock of up to 5.30 GHz. Overclocking is the process of increasing the clock speed of a chip beyond the manufacturer-decided clock speed. Things You Need to Look for in an Overclocked CPU or GPU So, let’s take a look at three ways to check if your CPU or GPU is overclocked.

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