A great motherboard with a couple of minor niggles
by JakeIt's one of the few boards still remaining with a dual 7-segment display for error-code readouts, which make troubleshooting any problems so much easier - I never buy a board without one anymore; life is too short for vague LEDs or speaker beep codes. These displays cost pennies - put them on all boards! Quality overall feels good, and it comes with an integrated I/O shield for less faffing. It would be nice if the provided heatsinks for the M.2 sockets were in separate parts, or somehow detachable, as one of my drives already has a heatsink and it a) looks cooler, and b) is a pain to take off. Of course a larger heat spreader can absorb and dissipate more heat, but it is less versatile. The RAM slots are ones with the clip only on one side, which I don't like: at first boot the 7-seg display proved its value by telling me there was a memory issue, and it was caused by one of the RAM sticks I had installed not being pushed in properly at the bottom, despite having it 'click' in at the top. Clips on both sides make this obvious. And Asus motherboards try to install their software for you in Windows unless you disable it in the BIOS - ROG Armoury Crate defaults to 'enabled'. Everything else is good or has just worked. It has a lot of I/O (12 USB total), 2x PCIe 5 x16 slots, and 2x PCIe 5 M.2 slots (though one of them will limit one of the PCIe 5 x16 to x8 - giving it the bandwidth of a PCIe 4 x16). Oh, and 8 fan headers (including the AIO pump one, which defaults to a constant 100% but could be changed and used for a regular fan in a pinch).
