ASUS TUF GAMING Z890-PRO WIFI ATX -emolevy

Bought this motherboard as a bundle from QuietPC, including CPU, cooler and memory as my current pc did not meet the hardware requirements for Windows 11( core-7 4770 and 8gb ram). A shame as it was working perfectly fine. I try to get the best I can afford without going stupidly expensive. So the board has an Intel Core Ultra 7 and 64 gb of ram fitted. The board seems very well designed and built and feels like a quality bit of kit.

I replaced the old motherboard and refitted all the old peripherals to the new board, with and I did not do a fresh OS install. The board booted first time with no issues and the Asus web browser started automatically and updated the drivers. I only have 2 issues, as I am still running Win10 and there is no drivers for the wifi7 module, once Win11 is loaded this should be sorted. Windows and office needed to be reactivated due to the hardware change, but this was easy and done without any pain.

As motherboard swaps go this has been the easiest I’ve done, without the need to do a fresh OS install.

Space is tight around the motherboard, with the two SATA sockets on front under the heat sink difficult to get to and it is a bit close between the optical drives and the cpu cooler, but does not cause any temperature issues. Most new systems don’t have optical drives anymore, so do I really need to have the two I have fitted to the case?

Being old, I like to have a printed manual in front of me, rather than flicking back and forth on my iPad, for some reason I could not download the manual to my iPad from the Asus website, so had to download load it to my pc and email the pdf to myself (luckily I had not stripped the machine apart at that point) and the I could open it on the iPad.

Got my wife’s old PC to do next and will definitely go down the same route with the Asus motherboard.

Solid, well built motherboard, colour looks premium! All the connections/components were easy to use and clicked with such lovely precision and booted everything quickly.. Cannot fault in anyway - such a joy to look at too!

Its a great motherboard but trying to find out what various slots do is not straightforward. again the updating process could be a lot more streamlined. But I like the quality. It could do with another SSD slot without having to buy another pcie card.