An ROG Z890 Maximus Hero board, an over-the-top Ryujin cooler, and a special new kind of RAM highlight the nuances of Intel’s just-launched desktop platform. Take a look.
At PC Labs this week, showing up alongside Intel’s Core Ultra 200S “Arrow Lake” silicon—its new generation of desktop CPUs—was an elaborate “care package” from Asus related to the launch. With the chips going on sale Oct. 24, so do compatible motherboards, some new supporting cooling gear, and a special new type of memory.
We break it all down in the video above, but here’s a snapshot below of the highlights of the actual hardware we got, and plenty of talk about what it all means for the future of the desktop according to Intel. (Also see our review of the Core Ultra 9 285K, Intel’s Arrow Lake flagship chip, and the very latest version of the Falcon Northwest Talon, our first Arrow Lake desktop review.) Yeah, We Need Another Hero: Here Comes the ROG Maximus Z890 Hero
.with apologies to Tina Turner. Asus’ ROG Maximus motherboard line has long been its flagship family for both Intel and AMD processors. In the box, we received its ROG Maximus Z890 Hero, a step down from its Maximus Extreme tippy-top flagship. The Hero now incorporates a host of AI-based features both for PC building help (enabling chat-based queries via a custom LLM) and for optimizing and tweaking your DDR5 memory and Arrow Lake CPU automatically.
The Hero board, though, is also all about creature comforts. Asus is giving users six (count ‘em) M.2 slots on this board, three supporting PCI Express 5.0. The primary, CPU-direct PCIe 5.0 slot is under a large heatsink loaded with ease-of-use features. You flip up a latch to release and lift off the heatsink, and under that, a slider lets you drop in an M.2 drive of any length and simply slide over a retainer to engage it. No more M.2 micro-screws! (The other slots don’t have the same mechanism but do employ swiveling fasteners that banish the terrible tiny screws, too.)
Q-Release is another welcome easy-install feature.
