ASRock Z490 Aqua Review: Testing ASRock's Water-Cooled Flagship

Software

On the software side, ASRock includes programs for a variety of applications including RGB lighting control, overclocking and an App Shop designed to download and update your applications and drivers. ASRock doesn’t have a single program to house all of these applications, so you will have to download them separately. Below we’ve captured several screenshots of the App Shop, Polychrome Sync, A-Tune, and the Nahimic 3 audio program.

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Firmware

To give you a sense of the Firmware, we’ve gathered screenshots showing a majority of the BIOS screens.

ASRock’s BIOS is one of the more user-friendly and good-looking UEFIs out of the major brands. Using a black background with white writing and sky-blue highlights, it’s easy to read. The Taichi’s gear/clockwork theme also finds its way in here.

At first boot, you’re greeted by Easy Mode, a more information-based page than tweaking, though you can adjust some things (XMP profiles, canned fan settings, etc). Going into the Advanced Mode, we see several headings across the top. The BIOS is deep and includes a lot of functionality, with the most frequently used items easily accessible and not buried within sub-menus.

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Test System and Comparison Products 

Our test system uses Windows 10 64-bit OS (1909) with all threat mitigations applied. The motherboard BIOS used is the latest non-beta available to the public, unless otherwise noted. The hardware used is as follows: 

For this review, we’ll be directly comparing the ASRock Z490 Aqua ($1,105.99) to the other flagship Z490 boards we’ve tested, Asus’ ROG Maximus XII Extreme ($849.99), the MSI MEG Z490 Godlike ($749.99), and Gigabyte’s Z490 Aorus Extreme ($799.99). 

Benchmark Settings

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