ASUS ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming WIFI Motherboard Review

Reviews for the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K are out together with the new 800 chipset motherboards to support the new LGA 1851 socket. We have the ASUS ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming motherboard to look at and compare against the rest of the Z890 motherboard stack. The AUS ROG Strix Z890-F is priced at Php 30,690 and is surprisingly among the cheapest Z890 boards on our initial review stack.

ASUS ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming Motherboard – A Closer Look

Like other motherboard vendors, ASUS didn’t update the packaging design for its latest Z890 motherboard. Apart from the relevant feature badges for the new Z890 chipset, you have the same layout as last year’s ROG Strix Z790 boards. The back shows a more detailed feature list of the Z890-F Gaming WiFi.

ASUS went back and forth for the design of its ROG Strix gaming motherboards. Our last look at the ROG Strix Z790-F II showed a more streamlined design yet it had an out of touch ROG chipset design. This year’s iteration shows a much more uniform design yet it looks more bulky compared to last year due to the silver accents throughout the board.

The back of the motherboard shows a pixelated-style ROG print.

You have an improved VRM setup as last year’s Z790-F II Gaming WiFi motherboard with 16(110A)+1(90A)+2(90A)+2(80A) power stage design on the ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming WiFi. While it’s the same CPU VRMs as last year’s, this year’s flagship Core Ultra 9 285K consumes less power than the 14900K so you have less stress on the VRMs overall.

Memory support on the ASUS ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming WIFI Motherboard can go as high as DDR5-9066+, an improvement from last year’s DDR5-8000 max support. With the new Arrow Lake platform, the 800 series chipset supports CUDIMM memory memory modules and the Z890-F Gaming WIFI is no exception. ASUS debuts DIMM FIT feature on the new motherboard. It’s a BIOS feature that precisely analyzes individual modules to optimize performance and pinpoint potential issues.

Following most ASUS ROG Strix motherboards, the new Z890-F Gaming WiFi II is equipped with ASUS’ signature ProCool II EPS 12V power connectors. These connectors support up to 384W per conn and 9A per pin which was already overkill for the 14900K’s power consumption on the previous board, and is definitely the same for new new Core Ultra 9 285k flagship.

ASUS isn’t typically known for the quantity of ports on its motherboards as they’re more oriented on the faster speed. This time around, ASUS went for both with very generous back IO ports. You have four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type A ports, four USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one Display Port 1.4a, one HDMI 2.1 port, 2.5Gb ethernet, and WiFi 7.

ASUS debuts a quick release mechanism on its WIFI 7 port dubbed the Q-Antenna.

Following ASUS’ improvement in connectivity, the Z890-F Gaming WiFI has five M.2 ports – the first slot supports PCI-E Gen 5 while the rest has up to Gen4 support.

Only the slot with the PCI-E Gen 5 support has a solo heatsink that’s also larger compared to the two M.2 heatsinks that house two M.2 slots each. The Gen 5 heatsink has a pretty clever tool-less installation mechanism but the other heatsinks still needs a screw to mount. This is where the Z890-F Gaming WIFI falls behind other competitors as most of them, have a tool-less M.2 heatsink mechanism regardless of the ports.

The M.2 PCI-E Gen 5 port gets another special treatment with the introduction of the Q-slide feature to lock the SSD in place. The rest of the M.2 slots has a redesign M.2 Q-Latch mechanism.

Benchmark Setup and Test Methodology

Gadget Pilipinas’ testing philosophy is to provide detail-oriented results as accurately as possible so that our readers can replicate our tests given that these conditions are met. Different benchmarking apps and sequences are used depending on the tested component or device.

We use CapFrameX 1.7.2 as our primary FPS capture and analysis tool for all our gaming benchmarks. The latest build version of Windows 11 Pro and WHQL-certified drivers are used for our benchmarks. Readings such as temperatures and power draws are recorded using HWINFO64, and other relevant software for cross-checking.

For more info, read our Review and Benchmark methodology article.

ASUS ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming Benchmarks

3DMark – Firestrike, Timespy, and CPU Profile

3DMark is the go-to benchmark for gamers because of the ability to share and compare results online.

SuperPI 32m

SuperPI is a single-threaded benchmark application that lets the CPU calculate Pi(π) to the nth digit. In this benchmark, we selected the Pi calculation to 32M, the highest available for the app. 

CINEBENCH 2024

Maxon’s Cinebench benchmark is one of the most iconic benchmark applications used by reviewers and enthusiasts. The latest Cinebench R23 uses the latest rendering architectures, including Intel’s Embree ray tracing technology and other advanced features from AMD and Intel that allow users to render the same scene on the same hard. 

PROCYON

Procyon benchmark suite is developed by the UL, the same team behind 3DMark and PCMark benchmarks. The UL Procycon video editing benchmark uses Adobe Premiere in a typical video editing workflow. The benchmark starts by importing two video project files with various edits, adjustments, and effects – the second project uses several GPU-accelerated effects. Each project is exported in 1080p with H.264 encoding and again in 4K with HEVC H.265. The reported score is based on the time taken to export all four videos.

OCCT Enterprise Benchmark

OCCT is a popular benchmark and stability testing tool among overclockers, enthusiasts and system integrators

wPrime 1024M

wPrime is a benchmark tool similar to SuperPI, but the former takes on finding prime numbers using Newton’s Method. The benchmark is set to calculate 1024 million prime numbers, and the performance is measured according to calculation time. 

V-RAY 5

V-Ray Benchmark is a stand-alone version of V-Ray developed by Chaos Group. It is designed to test the CPU and GPU by rendering sample scenes at a fixed amount of time. V-Ray is a plug-in mostly utilized by 3D computer graphics software applications mainly for industrial design, product design, architecture, film, and video game production. V-Ray is not limited to 64-threads as it supports multi and mega-threading. 

BLENDER

Blender is a widely used, free, open-source 3D creation suite. It supports the whole 3D pipeline process from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, and even motion tracking. Blender has become a standard for CPU benchmarks with the BMW27 and Classroom Scene most used. This prompted the company to release Blender Open Data Benchmark in 2018, a benchmark-specific version allowing users to run a preset benchmark and share the results online like 3DMark.

GeekBench 6.3

Geekbench is a multi-platform benchmark used to gauge CPU performance and compare them across Windows, Mac, and Mobile. Geekbench 6 is the latest version and doesn’t rely on memory more than the previous Geekbench 4, making it a great tool to measure both single-core and multi-core CPU performance.

PCMark10

From the same developers of the popular game benchmarking tool 3DMark, PCMark 10 is a benchmarking app for measuring a whole PC’s performance. It covers a wide variety of tests to reflect common tasks performed in a modern workplace. We selected PCMark 10’s extended benchmark and reported both the overall score and Digital Content Creation Score. 

CORONA RENDERER

Corona Renderer is an unbiased photorealistic render available for Autodesk 3Ds Max, Maxon Cinema 4D, and as a stand-alone application. Its popularity, similar to Blender, led Chaos Group to develop a benchmark version of the app which runs using Corona Renderer 1.3. Workstation systems, especially CPUs, can utilize Corona Benchmark as up to 72 threads can be used in the benchmark, making it very suitable for CPUs with various price segments. 

PassMark 10.2

Passmark 10 provides a comprehensive suite of tests that evaluate various aspects of a system’s performance, including CPU, GPU, memory, and disk performance. Its automated testing process makes it accessible and efficient for reviewers to conduct benchmarks and analyze the performance of different systems.

BapCo CROSSMARK

Crossmark is one of the few native cross-platform benchmark tools available for Windows, Android, Linux ChromeOS, iOS, and macOS. It measures overall system performance and system responsiveness using models of real-world applications making it a great comparison point across multiple platforms.

HANDBRAKE

Handbrake is a top-rated open-source video conversion software that is used by professionals, enthusiasts, and even reviewers as a reference point mainly because of its wide variety of media codecs. The rise of streaming and blogging makes video content, both encoding, and transcoding important for these people, regardless of whether they’re seasoned professionals or just starting out. Handbrake also takes advantage of AVX-512 and OpenCL to accelerate certain types of media codecs. Our Handbrake benchmark converts a 500MB MP4 video to H.264 to measure the processor’s performance.

OCTANE 2.0

Google Octane 2.0 is a benchmark that measures a Javascript engine’s performance by running multiple tests representing different use cases of JavaScript applications. While Google Octane is retired and no longer maintained, it is still a good representation of today’s dynamic, interactive web applications. Our Google Octane 2.0 is run on Microsoft’s latest Chromium-based Edge browser. 

ASUS ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming Motherboard Temperatures

ASUS has the most aggressive Intel Performance BIOS profile with the Core Ultra 9 285K peaking at 104°C throughout our entire benchmark suite. That said, VRMs are of different story as it’s the coolest and the only one under 40°C across our Z890 stack. It’s Idle temp is also impressive at only 35°C.

Our BIOS setting was set to default with the exception of XMP. No enhancement or boosting features were enabled. Tests were also performed under the Performance Profile and yet the Z890-F Gaming Wifi drew an extra 35W. This extra power consumption is the cause of the higher benchmark scores, and ofcourse hotter CPU temps as seen in our graphs.

CONCLUSION

Coming from the previous ASUS ROG Strix Z790-F Gaming WiFi II motherboard, there are really not many improvements on the new Z890-F Gaming WiFi except for Z890 chipset features – CUDIMM support and extra M.2 slot. That said, a major improvement in the new ASUS ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming WIFI is its connectivity with a very generous amount of ports and headers.

These improvements whether chipset or ASUS-initiated come at a cost. This year’s ROG Strix -F motherboard has a Php 3,060 premium over last year’s Z790-F Gaming WIFI II model. Apart from connectivity, quality of life has also improved with the new implementation of the PCIE and M.2 Q-Releases, yet feels slightly behind against other competitors especially on the tool-less mechanism on the heatsinks themselves. Performance-wise, the ASUS ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming WIFI II tops the charts in our benchmarks due to the more aggressive default BIOS profiles which then result in higher CPU temperatures.

Overall, the ASUS ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming WIFI is a very well-rounded motherboard that tops the spec in performance, build quality, connectivity, and reliability. It’s a“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach which may seem boring, especially for those like me who sport the same tier of motherboard in every generation. That said, those looking to get into a premium Z890 motherboard to pair with their new Intel Core Ultra 200S will find the ASUS ROG Strix Z890-F Gaming WIFI to be more than sufficient for their needs, most especially when it comes to connectivity. However, enthusiasts who are looking for a more feature-centric motherboard may look at other brands or the higher tier -E variant as the -F Gaming is still artificially gimped with the lack of Q-CODE, more Gen5 ports, and faster DDR5 memory.

Grant Soriano

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Grant is a Financial Management graduate from UST. His passion for gadgets and tech crossed him over in the industry where he could apply his knowledge as an enthusiast and in-depth analytic skills as a Finance Major. His passion allows him to earn at the same time help Gadget Pilipinas' readers in making smart, value-based decisions and purchases with his reviews and guides.