The motherboard features 6 Infineon TDA21490 power stages, and an outclass thermal design which is ideal for overclocking high-end CPUs like the 10900K. Ther is an OLED screen as well which you can customize to show all kinds of different information. The motherboard has plenty of armor and beautiful RGB lighting zones. You even get a DIMM.2 riser that you can use to install your extra Nvme storage and they fit next to the DIMM slots where your RAM is installed. It has all the features that you could ask for. Both are very different right now as Intel does not offer PCIe Gen4 support at the CPU level but there are motherboards that support the feature.įor the price, the ASUS ROG Maximus XII Extreme Z490 offers a robust build and looks great too. Right off the bat, you have to decide between Intel and AMD platforms. If that is something that you are looking for then you can upgrade your motherboard and go with PCIe Gen4. On the other hand, with PCIe Gen4, you can take advantage of the higher bandwidth of the supporting graphics cards and the PCIe Gen4 SSDs if you are interested in super-fast transfer speeds, the kinds that the PS5 is boasting right now.
For example, if you have an M.2 SSD which is sharing the PCIe lanes with your graphics card and are playing games at 1080p or 1440p at 144+ FPS.Īll those frames per second can cause issues when using PCIe Gen3 and you might need PCIe Gen4 but that is a very extreme case and the general consumer is not going to need a new motherboard with PCIe Gen4. You will feel the difference when you are making use of the different PCIe lanes and are playing at higher refresh rates at a lower resolution than 4K.