Asus ROG Strix Z690-A Gaming WIFI D4 Review: ROG’s Silver Bullet?

Firmware

Asus’ ROG Strix Z690-A Gaming WIFI D4 BIOS sports a familiar black-and-red theme. The BIOS is loaded with options and menus, and 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 fans of the Asus BIOS and its logical layout. It has everything you need and then some to tweak your motherboard and component settings. And if you want to know how to access your BIOS (from any system), we can help!

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Software

Asus has applications designed to control the motherboard's various functions, ranging from RGB lighting control to audio, system monitoring, overclocking, etc. Instead of plodding through each application as if it changes for each review, we’ll capture several screenshots of a few major utilities. In this case, here’s a look at Ai Suite 3, Armoury Crate, Sonic Studio III Suite and the Realtek Audio application.

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Test System / Comparison Products

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 has been 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

EVGA supplied our Supernova 850W P6 power supply (appropriately sized and more efficient than the outgoing 1.2KW monster we used) for our test systems, and G.Skill sent us a DDR5-5600 (F5-5600U3636C16GX2-TZ5RK) memory kit for launch day testing.

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Benchmark Settings

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