ASUS ProArt Z690-Creator WiFi 6E LGA 1700(Intel 12th Gen) ATX Content Creator Motherboard(PCIe 5.0,DDR5,2X Thunderbolt 4,10G&2.5G LAN,4xM.2,Front…

Setup:

Windows 11 Professional
Intel Core i9 12900K
Corsair iCUE H100i Capellix AIO CPU cooler
Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB DDR5 RAM 5600Mhz

Pros:

* Beautiful, aesthetically balanced between form and function.
* Rock solid stability. After one year of daily use (7-12 hours a day), I’ve run into no BSODs or freezes.

* If you overclock, the ASUS BIOS has ooodles of features and settings to help you get your fastest clock speed. Some of the best in the industry, really. (Just as a side note: I no longer overclock any of my PC components. I learned over the years, that overclocking most components will shorten their lifespans. The only exception in my case, was an Intel i7 2600K CPU which ran great overclocked for 11 years!)

* Two Thunderbolt 4 \ USB-C ports.
* Two Ethernet ports, with one rated at 10Gb (excellent for NAS use).
* Eight SATA ports for those running multiple VMs, have extensive databases or libraries, and those who need more than a single scratch drive.
* Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
* PCIe 5.0
* DDR5 memory support with XMP profiles
* Compatible with the upcoming Intel Core 13th generation processors.
* TPM header

Cons:

* The 4 M.2 slots are still at PCIe 4.0 (A moot point, since there are no PCIe 5.0 drives on the market as of this writing.)
* The Thunderbolt / USB-C ports initially crashed my computer when connected to a device. The fix was to go into BIOS and disable the ‘PCIE connection to USB4’ feature.

* Hard drives formatted using the NTFS file system are not detected by the motherboard when the built-in Intel GPU is enabled. (This is a problem with my other ASUS motherboard as well, a Prime Z590.) My conclusion is that if you need the built-in graphics to work, your hard drives will have to be formatted using the GPT file system.

If your drives are formatted with NTFS, you’ll have to enable CSM (Compatibility Support Module) in BIOS. The CSM feature, however, remains greyed out until the Intel GPU is disabled. In short, if you want to use NTFS formatted drives on this motherboard: first, disable integrated graphics and enable CSM. (This, naturally, is going in with the assumption that you have a separate graphics card in your setup.)

* The Corsair LED lights and software, iCUE, don’t work unless you go into the BIOS and disable the ‘SPD Write’ feature.
* Even though it has a TPM header, you’ll need to buy a TPM module separately if you want to use this with Windows 11 (SPI interface).

I want to love this board but I can’t.

The reason I bought this was because it had built in Thunderbolt 4 ports. However, my experience with it over the last few weeks has been that everything works great except for the Thunderbolt dock that I have connected to it. The dock works fine on other MacBooks that I have but on this motherboard it disconnects every few days and I need to unplug and plug it back in to make the motherboard recognize the Thunderbolt 3 dock again. Frustrating to say the least as it sometimes requires two or three times until it works again.