ASUS TUF Gaming Z490-Plus, LGA 1200 (Intel 10th Gen) ATX Motherboard (12+2 Power Stages, USB 3.2 Front Panel Type-C, 1Gb LAN, Addressable Gen 2 RGB Header & Aura Sync)

proswell made , I was surprised buy the sheer weight , well made . I like the fact that it does NOT have wifi . Their are 2 versions of this board , one with , and one with out WIFI . The one with out has 2 USB 2.0 hubs while the one with has only one . RGB lights are minimal on this , which I like , I paired this with a Fractal Design Celsius+ S24 AIO cooler and the board is has and handles the pump and 2 fans no problem in PWM mode , . I can also hook up the rgb lights on the cooler head to the board directly and it handles it just fine . I have 2 fan headers for the CPU fans and one pump header . Memory was a snap using some Gskill DDR2666 just popped it in and set the main timings and off to the races . No fidling around for days setting up memory timings , Best board I have ever seen to handle memory training Very easy to setup with many tweaking options . And fast wow ! paired it with a core I3 10100 and it is like having a 7700K, good enough until prices come down on a I5 1600K CONS: EDITBios can be tricky to figure out if You dig into it you will see under the tools menu " download asus app guard"seems that asus is putting some auto download into their bios , BAD IDEA ASUS !Their are many memory training settings to mess with here , on the scale of about 20 different settings , No kidding ! took me a week to figure these out but the main ones you want to enable are " turnaround timing" and latency " it took time for the board to auto set the correct memory settingsBy default ALL and I mean all power saving C-states and P-states are disabled be on the look out for thatalso all PCIE power savings by default are disabled , with both of these in the default settings I found the board unstable . I also disabled " memory scrambler" that helped Board Is picky on memory my Gskill ddr2666 ended up being a flop I had some corsair CMW16GX4M2C3200C16 that worked on hand , now much better running at XMP 3200 stable Bios 1001 seems to be the most stable bios 1208 is a flopNo usb 2.0 ports on the IO , just on the headers , had to buy a usb motherboard header to go in the rear of the case . Final thoughts : Very happy with the product ASUS has upped their game with a board that does NOT have a lot of bells and whistles and that is a plus in my book . She runs fast , boots fast . Tip have the latest bios ready I installed version 1001 and it is solid good basic Z490 board that will not break the bank. Tried those buggy AMD boards , are they faster ? sure , are they stable UH, NO ! cant go wrong with Intel for stability

I like the mobo but the aura sync software wont even start. I had some stability issues after my overclocks too but right now it seems to be running great. Do your research, there was a bit of a learning curve for me even though I've overclocked before. Pushed my i5 10600k to 5.1ghz pretty easily, but i had to take it back down to 4.9 because it was getting a little toasty on some games and crashed a few times. Its been fun to play with and there's lots of little settings to research and squeeze more performance out of.I just really wish the rgb stuff worked better since I plugged in a bunch of stuff to this board and I'm stuck with it all running in default. It still looks really cool though, maybe I'll find a work around down the road. Also I think it put some apps on my windows I didnt really want. All in all it feels pretty high end for the money and it looks incredibly well built and tuf.

Absolutely great. Fantastic. Just very very good. Got my i5-10600k to 5.1ghz with it. Super stable. Looks good. Can't beat it.

When installing, the frame that is supposed to hold the CPU, wouldn’t catch on the screw the first couple of times I tried to install it. Aside from that, no issues. Good board