Conclusion
...this is a board that, even at £800, fully realises its Extreme name and potential.It's rare that a brand-new chipset comes to the market supporting very few processors. It's rarer still that it has no backwards compatibility with similar chips, yet that is the boat we find ourselves in with the TRX40 platform and 3rd Gen Ryzen Threadripper CPUs.
With the CPUs costing either £1,200, £1,800 or £3,700, investing in the best motherboard makes a lot of sense, particularly if overclocking up to 64 core and 128 threads. It is from this thinking that the Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha is born.
Ostensibly the same as the regular Extreme in almost every way, thereby making it an excellent choice from the get-go, Alpha bolsters the power-delivery system enough to take care of ludicrous cooling and scarcely believable voltages.
This is a board that, even at £800, fully realises its Extreme name and potential. Once you get past the price, it's nearly perfect, blending great looks and fulsome features with a solid layout.
Rotated connectors and a four-NVMe expander card would have been nice, but as an overall package, this is a great choice for that powerhouse of a 'ripper build.
Extreme power-delivery support
LiveDash is cool
Good temperatures
Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha
HEXUS.where2buy
The Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha is available from Scan Computers.
HEXUS.right2reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
Related Reading
5 Asus shares its Intel Z690 motherboard guide
And rivals such as Gigabyte, MSI and EVGA outline their Z690 chipset offerings.
1 Asus ROG Strix Z690-I Gaming Wi-Fi motherboard images leak
Mini-ITX board uses daughterboards to pack in features but maintain its diminutive footprint.
21 Diagrams of 12VHPWR 600W connectors for GPUs spotted
Power connector is part of the PCIe 5.0 standard and rumoured for the RTX 3090 Ti.
