Alder Lake chips may be some of the best CPUs on the market and are also surprisingly already slightly on sale for the holiday season, but getting a compatible Z690 motherboard and perhaps some DDR5 RAM to go with it is still a pricey prospect. That's why savvy shoppers might want to go for older chips instead, especially if they want to stick with Windows 10. If you don't want to make manual adjustments, Alder Lake works best on Windows 11 right now due to poor thread scheduling support on Windows 10.
Luckily, older motherboards are also on sale this holiday season, like the Asus TUF Gaming Z590-Plus WiFi with an LGA 1200 socket.
This is a full-sized ATX motherboard with PCIe 4.0 support and three M.2 SSD slots. Of course, you also get four RAM slots, but this is all to be expected. Of note here are the two built-in heatsinks for M.2 drives, plus the VRM (voltage regulator module) heatsink. And, of course, you've got two Aura Lightsync (meaning you can control them with Asus Armoury Crate) lighting zones.
The pre-mounted I/O shield also has USB 2.0, 3.2 Gen 1, 3.2 Gen 2, and even Type-C ports. You've even got a PS/2 slot for super old-school peripherals.
For mass storage, you can also use the 6x SATA 6GB/S connections. Wireless connectivity comes in the form of Intel Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0. Wired internet works using a 2.5Gb Ethernet connection.
Also of note here is that this motherboard claims to add two-way noise cancellation to headset calls using the Realtek S1200A driver.
This is the lowest price we've ever seen the motherboard hit. In our review for this board, we praised its unique M.2 latching mechanism (for use with the included heatsink) but wished it had more rear USB ports.
You can find even more savings at our best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals page. We're also tracking the best Cyber Monday monitor deals, best Cyber Monday CPU deals, best Cyber Monday SSD deals, best Cyber Monday gaming laptop deals, best Cyber Monday keyboard deals, best Cyber Monday gaming mouse deals and the best Cyber Monday PC hardware deals overall.
Makers and hobbyists will find sales by checking out the best Cyber Monday 3D printer deals, best Cyber Monday Raspberry Pi deals and best Cyber Monday robot deals. If you're shopping for a graphics card, we even have advice on how to find the best RTX 3080 deals, best RTX 3070 deals and best RTX 3060 deals you can find in this challenging market.
