ASRock Z690 Aqua Motherboard Review

A handsomely equipped Z690 flagship with an integrated water block for $1,149.99.

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ASRock Z690 Aqua
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Joe Shields
Joe Shields
Staff Writer, Components

Joe Shields is a staff writer at Tom’s Hardware. He reviews motherboards and PC components.

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • drtweak
    How is "Only 3 M.2 Slots) a Con? Like unless you getting high end stuff you'd be lucky to have 2.
    Reply
  • escksu
    Wow, $1150 for a mainboard....lol...

    3 slots I think its pretty decent already. This is because there is only 4 x PCIE 4.0 lanes direct to the CPU. This means only 1 SSD will have direct path the CPU while the rest have to go through the chipset.

    The chipset has 8x DMI 4.0 lanes (equivalent to 8x PCIE 4.0), so under certain situations, it may become a bottleneck.
    Reply
  • SyCoREAPER
    drtweak said:
    How is "Only 3 M.2 Slots) a Con? Like unless you getting high end stuff you'd be lucky to have 2.

    Was going to post the exact same thing, two is plenty and luxury enough.

    They are either nitpicking just to nitpick or wanted to has 3 pros and a matching 3 cons.
    Reply
  • coromonadalix
    Well i'm waiting for an 2k$$ gold plated motherboard, or one with titanium block on it ??
    Reply
  • drtweak
    sycoreaper said:
    Was going to post the exact same thing, two is plenty and luxury enough.

    They are either nitpicking just to nitpick or wanted to has 3 pros and a matching 3 cons.

    Right? Like I just upgraded my Plex server motherboard. I was using my old board and cpu (x570 and 3600 as my server and PC use to be one and not they are not) and the board i got, even though open box from Microcenter which I have had zero issue with, has 3 M.2 slots at PCIe 4.0. I mainly needed to have 3 x16 slots (with the last being only 4x wired which was better than 1x i was getting for one raid card and the other was only getting 4x) and now i got my GPU on 8x, RAID 1 8x RAID 2 4x and there is a huge speed difference even though the cards are only PCIe 2. But now i have 2 M.2s of the 3 slots i have and still PCIe to go around.
    Reply