ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero

It is a beautiful art ot work many only 2 usb port connections. I dont how to work the display port.

Okay, get ready for a mouthful, but DEFINITELY READ THIS IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING BUYING THIS MOTHERBOARD.

I got this motherboard to run my i9-13900k. Which for anyone reading this who’s inexperienced, I’d suggest not doing. If you don’t trust yourself to flash your BIOS with a flash drive, either get a 12th gen cpu or grab a Z790 board instead so you don’t accidentally brick your board.

None of that was an issue for me however and I was able to flash the board no problem and has no issues in that regard. The issues for me started with the board physically the minute I opened the box. One of the two USB 3.2 ports had its pins COMPLETELY bent. I attached the photos of what I saw after I took it out of the box.

I immediately called ASUS support to try and get this fixed. After providing them my serial number and name, they informed me that while I was within my warranty for the board bent pins are not covered under warranty. I explained again that I had just taken it out of the box, and they were already bent. They said the most they could do would be to have me send them the motherboard for a free diagnostic test (whatever that means) and after that I would need to pay them to fix the board and have it sent back to me… this process would take 7-10 days as well. I need my computer to work full time from home so that was not an option and I wasn’t about to pay to fix something that was broken on arrival.

At this point I decided the best course of action would be for me to order this board again, and after it arrives I can pack this one up and return it for a refund. Yesterday the replacement board arrived and I opened it up to find that the pins on the same USB gen 3.2 port were bent AGAIN. Luckily for me this time only 2 of them were bent and I was able to bend them back into position and the port works fine now.

But definitely buyer beware, I don’t know if their stock of these boards all have this issue or if I got extremely unlucky, but they didn’t make it easy for me to fix this problem and in the end I really had to fix it myself.

Something of note is that it was the same lower USB 3.2 port on both boards that had bent pins, which makes me thing it might be a manufacturing thing or something, but definitely be careful when buying and be aware you could get broken pins, if you only need one 3.2 header you should be fine to still use it as there’s a second 3.2 header that was fine on both boards I got. But if you ever plan to resell this board it will lose a significant chunk of value due to that.

Other than that the board looks amazing and now that I have one with both ports working I love it. But the bad service and the two faulty boards makes me never want to go asus for my boards again. Which is a shame because I feel like they make a lot of the best looking high end boards on the market. Most likely moving forward I’ll be going with a different brand till asus can get their QC under control

Compared to other z690 boards, the flexibility with allocating PCI gen 4 and 5 lanes is awesome. USB 5/Thunderbolt 4 is great for future use but really nothing uses now. AI overclocking and fan control overcome the massive increase in complexity overclocking Alder Lake CPUs, solve the problem where changes in room temp or cooling capability (dusty fan grill etc) could cause overheating without adjustments and keeping fan usage to a minimum while keeping temps low without a ton of hassle. This WAS all great but I experienced a hardware issue with the sound chip: the DAC would randomly emit full volume digital noise and sometime require a reboot to fix. I believe there may be a firmware update for the sound solution now, but I cannot try it as I have already returned it. Great board, hopefully the sound issue doesn’t become widespread.