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ASRock Z690 Aqua Gaming Motherboard Review
We’ve covered several high-end Z690 gaming motherboards here at PC Gamer — including ASRock’s own pricey Z690 Taichi — but that $590 Taichi is a steal compared to the board I’m putting in front of me right now.Yes, there’s a new, exclusive set of Halo boards for $1,400 ASRock Z690 Aqua Sitting on Baotou. What do we call them? Ultra high end? Super enthusiast? Ultra high end? Kind of funny? Whatever you want to call a $1,000+ motherboard, it’s definitely the category the Z690 Aqua falls into.
The ASRock Z690 Aqua joins the Asus Maximus Extreme Glacial, Aorus Xtreme WaterForce, and MSI Godlike in this bizarre team of well-named and priced boards. They are all priced well above what 99.9% of the market would even consider appropriate.
but these are simply no Circuit boards designed for the mass market. Some people have more money than others. That’s the way of the world, and obviously a limited-edition premium product like Aqua is needed. Such motherboards are the manufacturer’s “see what we can do” statement, and the buyer’s “see how much cash I can splurge” statement.
It’s like giving engineers and designers a blank slate to see what they can come up with, and the price be damned. I think ASRock’s designers and engineers would be proud of themselves, why shouldn’t they?
Once you get past the sticker shock, there’s no doubt that the Z690 Aqua is a work of motherboard art. It’s limited to runs of 500 units, although our particular sample doesn’t count towards one of those. Our review sample didn’t have a number adjacent to the chipset’s cooler, but instead came with the unique PC Gamer nomenclature. cool. We are special.
Z690 Aqua Specifications
socket: Intel LGA 1700
CPU Compatibility: Intel 12th Gen
Constituents: EATX
Memory support: Up to DDR5-6400+(OC), up to 128GB
Storage: 3x M.2; 8x SATA
USB: Up to 2x Thunderbolt 4, 4x USB 3.2 Gen2x2, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2, 8x USB 3.1 Gen 1, 4x USB 2.0
exhibit: 1x HDMI, 2x DP 1.4 input
networking: Intel Wi-Fi 6E; Aquantia AQC113CS 10G LAN, Killer E3100G 2.5G LAN
sound: Realtek ALC1220 7.1ch HD Audio
price: $1399
Let’s start by looking at the packaging and accessories.The box is huge, and Heavy. The overall design and even the fonts used add a minimalistic class. Below the motherboard tray is an accessory layer, divided into four separate sections. There are the usual inclusions like SATA cables, Wi-Fi antennas and manuals, but there are also water leak detectors that compete with digital readouts. touching! Asrock also includes thermal paste and spare thermal pads.
Now let’s take a look at the motherboard itself, which is beautiful. All that metal looks space-aged, and it’s covered not only in the front, but also in the back with a full back panel. The board includes three M.2 slots, all supporting PCIe 4.0 x4. One of them is to the right of the memory slot. This is the area where we’d like to see the M.2 slot away from the cooling GPU.
Considering that some motherboards support up to five, would a fourth M.2 slot be better? Maybe, but to make up for it, the motherboard includes eight SATA ports, which are becoming less common these days as SATA falls out of favor.
The board includes dual PCIe 5.0 slots, another PCIe 4.0 16x slot (x4 electrical), and one PCIe 3.0 1x slot. You get 8 4-pin fan headers and 4 RGB headers, 3 of which are addressable, then there are two USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 Type-C headers and two USB 3.2 Gen 1 headers.
All in all, there is plenty of extended support.
One of the really cool inclusions is a small OLED display that shows various system information like temperature and voltage. There are several RGB splashes on the rear I/O section and on top of the chipset heatsink. If you do buy a motherboard like this, we want you to show it off. It is a crime to put it in a box that will never be found.
At this price, you’d expect the Aqua to have a top-of-the-line VRM system, and it does. A water-cooled 20-phase VRM with a 105A rating presents no challenges, even a heavily overclocked 12900K. The chip will reach its own thermal limit before the motherboard.
Our aging 240mm custom water cooling setup isn’t optimal for a high-performance 2022 CPU. The VRM test, consisting of a 20-minute Cinebench cycle, provided a VRM temperature of 55°C, which is still ramping up due to the increasing liquid temperature. If you have a better radiator and pump, your VRM temperature is unlikely to be that high. Don’t worry about 55°C either.
Regarding the VRM, if you really need to run it with air or AIO cooling, I wish ASRock would bundle a couple of basic VRM coolers. Granted, we know this is a motherboard designed for custom water cooling, but buying a few bucks worth of coolers at this price won’t hurt ARSock’s bottom line.
The obvious highlight of the back I/O is the dual Thunderbolt 4/USB 4.0 Type-C ports. These are connected by a pair of DP 1.4 ports to support multiple monitors. Other USB ports include a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and four 3.1 Gen 1 ports. There is an HDMI port, while the audio port is powered by the Realtek ALC1220 codec. The audio section includes an ESS Sabre 9218 DAC and WIMA audio cap. There are clear CMOS and BIOS flashback buttons.
In terms of networking, the Aqua is almost as good as a consumer-grade board. At this price though, what would you expect. There are Intel Wi-Fi 6E, Killer E3100G 2.5G LAN and Aquantia AQC113CS 10G LAN rounding out the networking options.
Now that the 12th generation platform has matured, it’s not surprising that most motherboards are only 1% or 2% performant. The Z690 Aqua is what we call a Gen 1.5 motherboard. It arrives a few months after the first wave of motherboards, which means its BIOS should be mature out of the box, unlike some earlier boards that struggled a bit with memory compatibility.
In system benchmarks, the board performed as expected. It performed reasonably well in the Cinebench R23 test, but virtually all boards were within the margin of error.
System performance
When it comes to gaming performance, it’s about the same. The RTX 3080 Ti performed as expected. A frame or two here or there won’t make any noticeable difference.
Gaming performance
While we have the standard Aqua on hand instead of the Aqua OC, it won’t have any impact on the CPU’s performance unless you want to push the memory to the max or use LN2 cooling.
Our CPUs run into their own cooling limitations before the board is remotely stressed, so the capabilities of your own CPU will be the deciding factor.
But when it comes to memory overclocking, things are different.
To get the most out of your RAM, a good motherboard is a must, and Aqua definitely delivers. We were able to hit a fiendish 6666MHz at 36-38-38 and 1.45V, which is slightly less than what we could achieve with the two DIMMs Asus Z690 Apex. Bearing in mind that two DIMM boards should have an advantage, we’d say this is an excellent result for the Aqua, it could have been more if you weren’t afraid to push the IMC voltage.
Overall, the Aqua feels like a full-fledged motherboard that’s ready to really roll out SK Hynix memory out of the box. nice one!
I love the ASRock Z690 Aqua, but, let’s face it, at the same time it’s an unquestionably ridiculous motherboard. The idea of paying $1,400 for a motherboard is not true. But, for most people, it doesn’t make much sense to spend $200,000 on a Ferrari for a ride around town. At the end of the day, it’s a buyer’s market. If you want it and are ready to pay, you’ve got a great motherboard.
As a technical statement, the Z690 Aqua is stunning. Constructed like a tank, it’s packed with features and deserves to be shown in all its glory in a giant windowed case. Impossible to recommend, hence the score, but with only 500 available worldwide, our recommendation doesn’t make much sense anyway.
It’s a showcase technique, and from that perspective, I can’t help but love it.