ASRock Z690 Extreme WiFi 6E Review

Installation, Evaluation & Conclusion

The first item we received for our LGA 1700 evaluations was a DDR5 kit. While we had plenty of DDR4 that would have fit ASRock’s Z690 Extreme WiFi 6E, keeping those upcoming comparisons fair required us to track down something more specific: Single-rank DDR4 16GB modules. What we ended up with was Mushkin’s Redline DDR4-4000.

Our Core i9-12900KF was only rated for DDR4-3200, and while we knew we could squeeze its memory controller to DDR4-3600 in a performance-enhancing Gear 1 mode, we did not yet have DDR4-3600. Since we needed baseline performance anyway, we chose to start at DDR4-3200, using both JEDEC-approved CAS 22 and enthusiast-approved CAS 16 timings.

The remaining components are primarily designed to keep the system cool, with the CPU water block, 60mm-thick radiator, and enormous water pump all coming from Alphacool.

	Synthetic Benchmarks and Settings
PCMark 10	Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation
3DMark Professional Edition	Timespy, Firestrike Extreme Default Presets
SiSoftware Sandra	Version Version 2021.11.31.53 Memory Bandwidth, Memory Latency
Cinebench R23.2	Build RBENCHMARK330542 CPU Multi Core Benchmark
AIDA64	Version 6.50.5800, BenchDLL v4.5.859.8-x64
	Application Tests and Settings
LAME MP3	Version 3.98.3 Mixed 271MB WAV to mp3: Command: -b 160 –nores (160 Kb/s)
HandBrake CLI	Version: 0.10.5-x86_64 Sintel Open Movie Project: 4.19 GB 4k mkv to x265 mp4
Blender	Version 2.93.5 BMW 27 CPU Render Benchmark, BMW 27 GPU Render Benchmark
7-Zip	Version 21.04 Beta integrated benchmark + custom workload bench: 7.6 GB mixed files to .7z, CL switches “a -t7z -r -m0=LZMA2 -mx=9”

Intel Core i9-12900KF Sandra Memory Bandwidth

Intel Core i9-12900KF Sandra Memory Latency

Note that even though we didn’t have another motherboard to compare yet, we primarily used standard tests that users can replicate without requiring any custom files. Without a comparable platform, our general observations are that Intel’s Core i9-12900KF processor uses much more power under Prime95 Small FFTs than we’ve seen in previous consumer models. The Z690 Extreme WiFi 6E has no problems producing the current this processor needs, but our upcoming overclocking feature will give it a chance to truly prove its mettle.