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Asus Prime Z690-A Firmware
Asus’ Prime Z690-A BIOS should be familiar to those who ran Prime boards in the recent past. The Prime’s black and light-blue/white theme persists, as does the ease of movement through the UEFI and similar to Z590, except for items new to Alder Lake (P and E core adjustments, to name a couple). It’s loaded with options and menus, though the most frequently accessed items are easily accessible and not buried several layers down. There’s also an easy mode that’s more of a dashboard with limited functionality. We’re a fan of the Asus BIOS and its logical layout. It has everything you need, and then some, to tweak your motherboard and component settings. If you want to know how to access your BIOS (from any system), we can help!
Software
Asus has applications designed for various functions, ranging from RGB lighting control, audio, system monitoring, overclocking and more. Instead of plodding through each application as if it changes for each review, we’ll capture several screenshots of a few major utilities moving forward. In this case, here’s a look at Ai Suite 3, Armoury Crate, Sonic Studio and the Realtek Audio application.
Test System / Comparison Products
As of October 2021, we’ve updated our test system to Windows 11 64-bit OS with all updates applied. We kept the same Asus TUF RTX 3070 video card from our previous testing platforms but updated the driver to version 496.13. Additionally, our game selection was updated, as noted in the table below. We use the latest non-beta motherboard BIOS available to the public unless otherwise noted. The hardware we used is as follows:
Test System Components
| CPU | Intel Core i9-12900K |
| Memory | Kingston Fury DDR5 5200 CL40 (9KF552C40BBK2-32) |
| Row 2 - Cell 0 | GSkill Trident Z DDR5 5600 CL36 (F5-5600U3636C16GX2-TZ5RK) |
| GPU | Asus TUF RTX 3070 |
| Cooling | MSI MEG Coreliquid S360 |
| PSU | EVGA Supernova 850W P6 |
| Software | Windows 11 64-bit (21H2, Build 22000.282) |
| Graphics Driver | NVIDIA Driver 496.13 |
| Sound | Integrated HD audio |
| Network | Integrated Networking (GbE or 2.5 GbE) |
| Row 10 - Cell 0 | Row 10 - Cell 1 |
Benchmark Settings
| Synthetic Benchmarks and Settings | Row 0 - Cell 1 |
| Procyon | Version 2.0.249 64 |
| Row 2 - Cell 0 | Office Suite, Video Editing (Premiere Pro), Photo Editing (Photoshop, Lightroom Classic) |
| 3DMark | Version 2.20.7290 64 |
| Row 4 - Cell 0 | Firestrike Extreme and Time Spy Default Presets |
| Cinebench R23 | Version RBBENCHMARK330542 |
| Row 6 - Cell 0 | Open GL Benchmark - Single and Multi-threaded |
| Blender | Version 2.93.1 |
| Row 8 - Cell 0 | Full benchmark (all six sub-tests) |
| Application Tests and Settings | Row 9 - Cell 1 |
| LAME MP3 | Version SSE2_2019 |
| Row 11 - Cell 0 | Mixed 271MB WAV to mp3: Command: -b 160 --nores (160Kb/s) |
| HandBrake CLI | Version: 1.2.2 |
| Row 13 - Cell 0 | Sintel Open Movie Project: 4.19GB 4K mkv to x264 (light AVX) and x265 (heavy AVX) |
| Corona 1.4 | Version 1.4 |
| Row 15 - Cell 0 | Custom benchmark |
| 7-Zip | Version 21.03-beta |
| Row 17 - Cell 0 | Integrated benchmark (Command Line) |
| Game Tests and Settings | Row 18 - Cell 1 |
| Far Cry 6 | Ultra Preset - 1920 x 1080, HD Textures ON |
| F1 2021 | Ultra Preset - 1920 x 1080, HBAO+, RT Med, TAA + 16xAF, Bahrain, FPS Counter ON |
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