ASRock releases Z690 AQUA motherboards

by ·

If the Z690 Taichi Razer Edition previously released by ASRock at CES 2022 is a more conventional product in design, then the two Z690 AQUA motherboards brought by today which are designed for a very small number of enthusiasts and extreme gamers, especially those who like to build water-cooled cooling systems and overclock.

Z690 AQUA and Z690 AQUA OC are ASRock’s latest flagship motherboards designed to unleash the best performance of Intel’s 12th Gen Core desktop processors. ASRock said that both Z690 AQUA motherboards use ASRock’s innovative scheduling and cooling technology, with the goal of breaking the limit of PC performance.

The difference between Z690 AQUA and Z690 AQUA OC is that Z690 AQUA OC has only two DDR5 memory slots and provides multiple physical buttons for extreme overclocking operations. Both integrate the CPU water-cooling head and cover the VRM circuit, providing good heat dissipation for the power supply system. The motherboard uses a 20-phase power supply and a 12-layer PCB, supporting DDR5-7000+ and XMP 3.0, equipped with two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, and one PCIe 3.0 x1 slot, providing six SATA3 ports, three M.2 (two PCIe 4.0 x4 and one PCIe 3.0 x2/SATA3) slots, with an OLED screen on the top M.2 slot. In addition, there are 10Gb Marvell AQC113CS and 2.5Gb Killer E3100G network card, and provide Wi-Fi 6E (Killer AX1675 802.11ax network card) and Bluetooth connectivity.


The Z690 AQUA and Z690 AQUA OC also feature the Realtek-based ALC1220 audio solution with 7.1 channel support, ESS Sabre ES9218 DAC, gold-plated audio jack, and S/PDIF optical output. Both motherboards offer two rear USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two Thunderbolt 4/USB4 Type-C ports (with PD 3.0 support), one HDMI 2.1 output, and two DisplayPort 1.4 inputs. Slightly different, the Z690 AQUA also has four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, but the Z690 AQUA OC has only two, its place being replaced by a PS/2 port.