ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Apex Motherboard Review - A Memory Monster

TweakTown's Rating: 87%

The Bottom Line

What a glorious motherboard! But its high price and Arrow Lake's tepid appeal make it a very niche product.

Pros

• It's a memory overclocking monster
• Beautiful design
• 6x M.2
• 320MHz Wi-Fi 7
• Packed with ROG flourishes

Cons

• That price!
• Overkill for non-overclockers

Should you buy it?

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Buy at Newegg for $719.99 USD

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

If you're an overclocker, you'll be familiar with ASUS ROG Maximus Apex motherboards. Whether you're one of the few interested in liquid nitrogen overclocking or you're a water-cooling enthusiast looking to build a top-end PC, ASUS Apex motherboards are certain to make your shortlist.

The Maximus Z890 Apex is built to extract every last bit of performance from Intel Core Ultra 200S CPUs. And, If you're a memory overclocking enthusiast, it's safe to say that few boards, if any, will match it when it comes to extracting everything from a CUDIMM memory kit.

But it doesn't lack general appeal, either. It's a lovely-looking motherboard, and it will surely appeal to system builders and modders looking to create a PC that's as much a work of art as a performance machine.

Feature-wise, it's got almost everything you could want, including Thunderbolt 4, 5G LAN, 320MHz Wi-Fi, and support for up to six M.2 SSDs. It's got loads of fast USB ports and even 60W USB PC support. So, even if Arrow Lake didn't light the world on fire, a fully tweaked system with a Z890 Apex at its heart, a 4K monitor, and a high-end graphics card will still deliver lots of performance.

The ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Apex has a hefty recommended retail price of $719, which, no matter how good it might be, will limit its appeal to deep-pocketed enthusiasts only.

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Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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ASUS ROG box designs and fonts haven't changed much in many years. And why change? The ROG brand is the most recognizable in the PC DIY market. The only change here is that the box is white and gray, which is obviously to match the theme of the board itself.

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The rear of the box shows off some key features and specifications, though there's a lot more to it than what you see here.

The ROG Maximus Z890 Apex comes with a comprehensive set of accessories, as you'd expect from a board in this price range.

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The key accessory is the ROG DIMM.2 card. It's a proprietary add-in card that allows you to install a pair of M.2 SSDs. It's a really good solution as it places the drives in the path of front-to-back case airflow away from hot-running graphics cards. The only downside, if you can call it that, is that it doesn't support PCIe 5.0 drives.

The Wi-Fi antenna is adjustable and well-built. In addition to the expected SATA and RGB cables, M.2 bits and pieces, and front panel Q-Connector, there's an impressive set of stickers, a thank-you card, and a bottle opener. Beer and overclocking sound good to me.

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Finally, there's the ROG memory fan kit. It's an easy-to-mount kit that directs air over the memory modules. You'll only need it if you push high voltages through your memory.

A USB drive contains drivers and a comprehensive set of ASUS utilities. Installing all of a motherboard's software applications usually means resource-hogging bloat, but in fairness to ASUS, there are some very handy apps, including a full-year license for AIDA64 Extreme ($60 value). The TurboV core app will be essential for overclockers, and you'll probably need to grab ASUS' Aura sync app for RGB control. HWINFO and CPU-Z apps are must-haves for any overclocker. These have a ROG theme.

Motherboard Overview

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Though looks are in the eye of the beholder, it'll be hard for anyone to complain about the board's gorgeous look. Apart from all that silver-colored cooling metal, the PCB is packed with auxiliary controllers, headers, switches, and buttons. Some major engineering went into this board.

There are two small RGB sections: one atop the rear I/O area and another adjacent to the topmost PCIe slot. There are three ARGB headers, too. A well-built system with the right accompanying components would look amazing. The Z890 Apex is sure to feature in many water-cooled and modded systems.

Alongside the common case connector headers, the Z890 Apex includes a whopping nine 4-pin fan headers, a thermistor cable header, and a decent USB header complement including four USB 2.0 ports, four 5Gbps ports, a Type-C 10Gbps port and a welcome Type-C 20Gbps port with up to 60W power delivery. To gain 60W PD support, you need to connect an 8-pin PCIe power cable to the connector located next to the SATA ports.

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Two DIMM slots support speeds DDR5-9600+, with up to 96GB supported. Some will consider 96 GB limiting, but this is a board for overclockers and gamers, for whom 96GB will be acceptable. It supports CUDIMM memory and is the only board we've tested so far that allows us to boot at 9600 MT/s, at least until the broader Arrow Lake ecosystem matures. With appropriate cooling and a capable memory controller, DDR5-10000 is no longer mythical.

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The Z890 Apex's VRM is top-notch. It includes a 22(110A)+1(90A)+2(90A)+2(80A) design for the VCCCORE, VCCGT, VCCSA, and VNNAON, respectively. Suffice it to say, if this board can shove 1000W+ (and kill) a fully loaded liquid nitrogen-cooled 285K, it will handle anything a more worldly user will ever throw at it.

The accompanying cooling is commensurate. Large metal heatsinks keep temperatures well within check. The 285K is less demanding than its 14th Gen predecessor, and we recorded a peak VRM temperature of just 52 degrees.

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The heatsinks are positioned close to the CPU socket area. Our Cooler Master PL360 FLUX AIO cooler could only be mounted in one direction, with the pipes facing the memory, and even then, it was a very tight fit. Some coolers with large fans or protruding heatpipes may struggle to fit. Check with your cooler maker to ensure your cooler of choice will fit.

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The Maximus Z890 Apex includes four M.2 slots on the board itself, plus another two via the DIMM.2 card, giving it support for six M.2 drives in total. The four slots on the board all support PCIe 5.0 drives, though running them all will reduce the bandwidth of the primary PCIe slot to 8x and disable the second x16 slot. The DIMM.2 card supports PCIe 4.0 drives. Four SATA ports mean the Z890 supports up to 10 storage devices.

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The primary PCB-mounted M.2 slot has its own large dedicated cooler, the second is smaller while the remaining two are cooled by a large plate. The primary M.2 slot and the primary PCIe slot have a PCIe x4 slot between them, creating a gap for improved airflow. I'd like to see more motherboard manufacturers design their boards like this, as a hot backplate and hot air coming off a graphics card can cause M.2 temperatures to shoot up dramatically.

The two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots share 16 lanes between them, supporting x16, x8/x8, or x8/x4/x4, depending on the storage configuration.

There are another two PCIe 4.0 x4 slots connected to the Z890 chipset.

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The Z890 Apex is absolutely packed with overclocking functionality. Alongside the power end reset buttons, there's a safe boot button, which hard resets the system, base clock adjustment buttons, no less than 18 voltage measurement points, a programmable Flexkey button, ln2 mode, slow mode, and dual BIOS.

The board features condensation detection sensors that warn if moisture is detected around the CPU, DRAM, and PCIe slot, while a dedicated IC provides more accurate software voltage monitoring. ASUS engineers should get a Christmas bonus for their work on the Maximus Z890 Apex!

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The Maximus Z890 Apex's rear I/O panel is very well-equipped. The well-labeled USB complement begins with dual Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports with DP support. These are joined by another Type-C 20Gbps port, four 10Gbps ports, and four 5Gbps ports.

Some overclockers still favor an old-school PS/2 port for chasing records, as its use frees the CPU from unnecessary USB polling.

A Realtek controller controls the single 5G LAN port. Wi-Fi 7 is also included. The Apex supports 320MHz connections, delivering up to 5.8Gbps of bandwidth. You also get Bluetooth 5.4 support.

Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports and S/PDIF. These are driven by a Realtek ALC4080 codec with several ASUS enhancements, such as a Savitech SVH712 amp, high-quality capacitors, impedance sensing, and signal shielding.

Finally, there are clear CMOS and BIOS flashback buttons. Regarding the latter, we can only hope that Intel will soon confirm that the LGA 1851 socket will support another CPU generation, as buying a board at this price that supports Arrow Lake only would be a travesty.

UEFI, Software and Test System

UEFI

As expected from a premium ROG board, the BIOS is packed with functionality, from the basic to the esoteric. Anyone buying this board surely knows their way around a BIOS. Still, even if you're not, most of the basic functionality is easy to find on the EZpage without navigating to the advanced section.

Pending Intel-mandated microcode updates, the Z890 Apex BIOS is as mature as can be expected for a new platform. During our pre-release testing of the 285K, several motherboard manufacturers issued frequent BIOS releases. ASUS, in contrast, did not, which points towards a significant pre-release effort from its team to ensure the board was ready from day one.

Of the three Z890 boards we've tested so far, the Apex was the only board to boot at DDR5-9600 with a G.Skill Royal CUDIMM kit. That proves that our 285K's memory controller is not the limiting factor. The MSI Unify-X has seen several BIOS releases since our initial tests, and it too is nearly certain to reach 9600MHz+ with the same kit, but, notably, the Apex could do it first without needing a flurry of pre and post-release BIOS updates.

Test System

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that Intel and AMD have relied on to showcase their newest platforms during unveilings. The benchmark has two tests: a single-core workload that utilizes one thread, or 1T, and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads, or nT, of a tested CPU.

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Though the differences between the tested boards are small, the Apex leads the boards we've tested to date. It should also be noted that for all the flak Intel took for Arrow Lake's performance, the 285K is very strong in both the nT and 1T tests.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is just one of many reasons a user will consider a high-core-count CPU like a Core Ultra 9 285K. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

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A result of 397 seconds is essentially the same as the other boards we've tested to date.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher result means the task will take less time to complete.

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Handbrake is influenced by memory performance too, and the ASUS performs well here.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's influenced by memory speed and latency changes and scales with the number of CPU threads.

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A result of 192.31 BIPS in this memory-sensitive benchmark again points towards strong memory performance.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency has traditionally favored Intel and its monolithic designs; however, Arrow Lake is far less impressive in that regard. A nanosecond or two here or there is not noticeable, but more significant margins, particularly when the memory is frequently accessed, will result in more undesirable and cumulative idle cycles.

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The Z890 Apex is a good step ahead of the other two boards. With a DDR5-7200 kit, the result is over 10ns lower than when using a 285K with a relatively standard DDR5-6000 kit. AMD and Intel's 14th Gen processors are still much lower again, but with some tuning, the Apex can close the gap.

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

We'd love to use our PCs purely for leisure, but some of us have to work, too! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.

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It's another strong result here for the Z890 Apex.

3DMark Storage

UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. It is superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs of the actual game. This test is the same as running the actual game without the inconsistencies inherent in application testing.

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The Z890 Apex is marginally behind here, but the MSI's advantage could be due to the location of its primary M.2 slot.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme is losing favor as a graphics benchmark in favor of Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

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The differences between the boards are not significant.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences.

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The Z890 Apex is slightly behind here, but the results are still within a margin of error.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards when using the' favor performance' preset.

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When all other components are equal, the motherboard does not significantly influence gaming benchmark scores.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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The MSI has a small edge here, but a percent or two here or there is within a margin of error.

VRM and SSD Temperatures

These tests are performed to show off the differences between each motherboard's cooling assemblies. In the case of VRM testing, each board is subjected to a 20-minute Cinebench loop, while the SSD test records the peak temperature recorded during the lengthy 3DMark Storage test.

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This is an excellent result for the Z890 Apex. As an overclocking board, you'd expect its VRM cooling to be top-shelf, and that's proven here.

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It's 55 degrees all around here. Motherboard manufacturers know the demands of fast PCIe 5.0 drives and have taken steps to equip their premium boards with decent heatsinks.

Final Thoughts

For all the talk surrounding the underwhelming Core Ultra 200S series, there are those who will buy them and overclock the bejeesus out of them. In time, we may see improvements to gaming performance, and fully tuned high-speed memory does help. That's where a board like the ASUS Maximus Z890 Apex shines.

However, at over $700, it's always going to be a niche product. That money would get you a 9800X3D and a B650 motherboard, which deliver superior gaming performance no matter how much you tweak a 285K. But 1080p CPU gaming performance isn't everything; things close right up if you game at 4K. Sometimes, a board is just plain fun to play with, and that is certainly the case with the Z890 Apex.

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It's chock full of overclocking functionality, and at the time of writing, it was the best memory overclocking board we've tested. If there's one certainty about Apex motherboards, it's that ASUS puts some serious effort into optimizing them and giving them features to extract the maximum performance from a given CPU generation.

It's not all about overclocking. The Z890 Apex will look amazing in a fully watercooled system. Some of the modded builds that will come soon will look stunning.

It doesn't lack features, either. You get Thunderbolt 4, PCIe 5.0 GPU and SSD support, 5G LAN, and 320MHz Wi-Fi 7. ASUS could not have included more than six M.2 slots without serious compromises, so it's also a good option for file hoarders. Add a mega VRM that can easily power any Arrow Lake CPU under extreme loads and heatsinks to keep it running relatively cool.

However, for all the Z890 Apex's features and capabilities, it is a $700 motherboard, and that limits its appeal. It's one for the deep-pocketed hardcore Intel enthusiast only. It's a lot of fun to play with, and it will look amazing in a well-built and designed system, but it's still a tough sell.

A Crosshair X870E Apex would surely be a delight. How about it, ASUS?