A unique Mini-ITX platform for "Rocket Lake" builders
Asus' ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming Wi-Fi motherboard doesn't gain much from its main attraction—an innovative secondary PCB—but its features and price still make it a tempting Mini-ITX platform.
The PC industry may see breakneck innovation from month to month, but some things stay unchanged for decades. Motherboard form factors are one of them. Companies building Mini-ITX boards have always had to struggle around the design’s limited real estate. With its $369.99 ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming Wi-Fi, Asus offers a radical solution—a secondary PCB that adds more physical room for components. Sadly, it’s underutilized and doesn’t really add a lot to the board (apart from cost), but the Z590-I still holds its own against other boards in its price range and is well worth considering—as long as you’re comfortable sticking with Intel’s 11th Gen “Rocket Lake” CPUs despite the emergence of 12th Gen “Alder Lake” chips and the new Z690 chipset.
Motherboard OEMs often have to make difficult choices when designing their products due to limited space on the PCB. The smaller the platform, the more acute the issue, and Mini-ITX board designers usually need to compromise to make everything work. Some less important components are removed entirely, and fewer capacitors end up attached to parts such as the audio controller and NIC.
To circumvent this issue, Asus got creative with the ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming Wi-Fi. Unable to fit everything it wanted on the Mini-ITX PCB, the company added a second PCB that plugs into the main board, providing several inches of additional room for components—in this case, two M.2 slots and possibly all of the audio circuitry. (I’ll explain “possibly” in a minute.)
The main PCB is no less busy for the inclusion of the secondary board, with several components in a tightly packed configuration. Along the top is the usual CPU power connector and a pair of fan headers. Down the right side of the board is the 24-pin motherboard connector, a USB Type-C header, a USB 3.0 header, and four SATA 3.0 ports.
The worst aspect of this design is the placement of headers between the PCI Express x16 slot and the heat spreader on the smaller PCB. Crammed between these two devices are the HD audio jack, a fan header, a USB header, and an LED header. These become difficult to access after you insert a graphics card, though this isn’t a flaw of this board alone—most modern Mini-ITX motherboards with M.2 slots with heat spreaders are affected by this same issue, and I can’t judge Asus too harshly for not finding a way to solve the problem here.
Appearance-wise, the ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming Wi-Fi has a look you’ll either love or hate. The board is almost entirely black, with minimal amounts of silver from lettering and components to add contrast. There’s an aRGB-backlit ROG logo on the secondary PCB, but none on the main PCB. If you’re looking for flair, you won’t find it here, but you have an ocean of other, more bling-worthy boards to choose from. If, like me, you prefer something a bit more reserved, you’ll find this Strix’s minimalist aesthetic a real treat.
Asus opted to go with an 8+2 power phase design for the ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming Wi-Fi, which makes sense given the board’s limited space. These are covered by two heatsinks and connected by a heatpipe. One heatsink integrated with the rear I/O shroud is actively cooled by a small fan that’s also built into the rear shroud, but both heatsinks should benefit from the fan thanks to the heatpipe connecting them.
The ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming Wi-Fi has adequately fast but unremarkable networking hardware. Intel’s Z590 chipset features an integrated Wi-Fi 6 AX201 networking controller, which provides relatively fast 802.11ax wireless network access with a top speed of 2.4Gbps. As most Z590 boards share these features, however, none of them is able to outshine the competition on this front.
Asus doesn’t score any points with this board’s wired network controller, either. The board incorporates a single 2.5Gbps Intel Ethernet NIC, which would have been fine a few years ago but is unimpressive for a high-end motherboard now that you can find several midrange boards with similar controllers. A few boards that compete in this price range ship with a 5Gbps NIC, which makes them more enticing from a networking standpoint.
As I mentioned earlier, most if not all of the audio circuitry resides on the secondary PCB that also holds two M.2 slots. It’s clear that most of the audio components are on this PCB including the Realtek audio codec and several capacitors, but it’s possible there are a few ceramic capacitors hiding under the rear I/O shroud close to the audio jacks. Either way, it’s obvious that Asus tried to push as much as possible onto this PCB.
The audio components are segmented from the M.2 hardware by a section of board that doesn’t have any traces running through it, which should help to prevent electromagnetic interference from adding static to the audio signal. Asus also configured this board with a connector similar to a PCIe x1 slot that allows for the audio lines to pass through to the main PCB close to the audio jacks, which also helps prevent the audio signals from passing by other components en route to the speakers.
Assuming this design didn’t significantly increase the motherboard’s cost, I think it was a wise choice. It may not necessarily result in better audio performance, but it certainly allows for more components than a standard Mini-ITX board would typically be able to hold.
As for the audio solution itself, it’s a Realtek ALC4080 audio codec with a Savitech SV3H712 amplifier. This codec is a fairly new one that I’ve only seen on a few motherboards to date; it has slightly superior specs versus the long-running Realtek ALC1220 seen on most half-decent boards today. How much of an improvement you’ll actually be able to hear while listening to music is questionable, but at least OEMs are trying to innovate in the audio department once again.
When we get to the rear I/O panel, we start to see a few possibly negative aspects of the dual-PCB design. The audio chipset included with the ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming Wi-Fi can support a 7.1-channel audio system and optical S/PDIF, but the I/O panel Asus provides has just three 3.5mm audio jacks for a more basic 3.1-channel sound system and a microphone.
There’s plenty of room on the rear I/O panel for additional audio connections, but Asus simply didn’t include them. I’m assuming that’s because the audio chipset is on the secondary PCB, but that’s the only logical reason I can think of for why the company omitted the two additional audio jacks and the optical S/PDIF port.
The rest of the rear I/O panel is fine for a Mini-ITX loadout, if not overstuffed. There’s a single RJ-45 jack and two antenna connections, an HDMI port, and a total of eight USB ports. Two of the latter are Type-C ports, with one set up as a Thunderbolt 4 port and the other as USB-C 3.2 Gen 2×2. Then there’s one 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, one 5Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A port, and four USB 2.0 ports. The board could use a few more USB ports, especially more that support USB 3.x, but I don’t consider it a major drawback.
Having two M.2 slots on a secondary PCB certainly helps to save space, but it also makes adding M.2 storage devices a bit more difficult. Removing the secondary PCB isn’t particularly tricky, but it takes longer than just removing a heat spreader. You must remove screws on both sides of the motherboard to detach the second PCB, and detach a ribbon cable as well.
Remounting the PCB afterward is an even bigger pain. There’s a flimsy plastic piece that bolts the card onto the rear I/O shroud that’s exceedingly difficult to fit correctly back into place. I spent more time fighting with it than I spent mounting the motherboard, removing the PCB, and adding an M.2 drive combined.
The ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming Wi-Fi utilizes Asus’ usual Republic of Gamers BIOS. It’s yet another board that boots straight into the advanced mode BIOS, which you might see as a positive if you’re an expert who always dives straight into that menu, but which I consider a design flaw: It can cause problems for less experienced users who aren’t sure what they’re doing, and renders the EZMode BIOS little more than a waste of space on the ROM.
That’s a shame, because the EZMode BIOS has all the options most users will need. From here you can set the memory profile, enable Intel RST, select a boot device, and confirm the basic system specs, including the CPU and RAM. MemTest86 is built in and launchable from the EZMode BIOS as well. For those of you who don’t know it, MemTest86 is simply the best tool for testing RAM for defects and stability issues.
The advanced BIOS offers a horde of additional settings, with lots more information on display. The main reason you’d ever need to jump in here is for overclocking, and the board fittingly provides an abundance of options to help make overclocking easy. There’s too much to cover in detail, but all the basics such as base clock and multiplier controls, as well as voltage controls for key components, are present.
You’ll spot a few useful tools such as MemTest86 in the advanced BIOS as well. The most useful one that isn’t also found in the EZMode BIOS is a utility to clean-wipe solid-state drives for disposal or resale.
We like the innovative dual-PCB approach of the Asus ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming Wi-Fi motherboard, even if it wasn’t employed to its full potential. Asus added more board real estate without adding a whole lot new or extra to the works, apart from the audio isolation. We’ve seen companies adding M.2 slots to the undersides of motherboards for some time, but Asus didn’t do that here, leaving you just two M.2 Key-M slots, albeit in a far more accessible location than on the bottom of a board. We’d like to see more done with this daughterboard approach in future Mini-ITX boards; this just scratches the surface, to our eyes. The design, alas, does not add a second LAN controller or extra power circuitry, but again: Mini-ITX has its limitations.
That said, this board worked flawlessly in our test build and provides competitive features for its price point; Mini-ITX, after all, is never cheap and sometimes not so easy to work with. It’s worth a look if you’re shopping for a Mini-ITX LGA 1200 platform, even as LGA 1700 and Intel’s Alder Lake loom.
Asus' ROG Strix Z590-I Gaming Wi-Fi motherboard doesn't gain much from its main attraction—an innovative secondary PCB—but its features and price still make it a tempting Mini-ITX platform.
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Michael Justin Allen Sexton is a life-long tech enthusiast and gamer. He began breaking down PCs and ancient video devices known as “VCRs” at the age of 10. When he isn’t gaming or tearing apart gadgets to learn how they work, he can usually be found reading history. He’s also a student of the Chinese language and has a first-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. You can follow him on Twitter @EmperorSunLao.
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