Asus TUF Gaming Z690-Plus D4 12th Gen ATX Motherboard

TUF Gaming Z690-Plus D4 Review

As its name implies, the Asus TUF Gaming Z690-Plus WIFI D4 uses DDR4 RAM instead of DDR5, letting you save quite a bit of money while getting very close to the performance of DDR5-based systems. the Z690-Plus is the least-expensive board we’ve tested so far. But don’t let the price fool you as it’s a capable board with a lot of features, and it handles the flagship Intel Core i9-12900K processor without issue.

The Z690-Plus also updates its appearance over the previous-gen board, with tweaks to the heatsinks and other minor changes. Asus removed the notch from the Z590-Plus WIFI board to the right of the chipset, with the area now holding a couple of SATA ports. Outside of PCIe 5.0, the board comes with four M.2 sockets and four SATA ports, 2.5 GbE and integrated Wi-Fi 6, solid power delivery, a good (if not cutting-edge) audio solution and support for DDR4. There is a lot to like here, especially for the price.

That brings us to performance and using DDR4. Some tests showed it just as fast as DDR5, but others a lot slower. It simply depends on the test used and if it’s bandwidth and latency heavy. For example, 7-Zip compression is slower with DDR4, but decompression was spot on against the DDR5. On average, the TUF Gaming Z690-Plus was a couple percent slower than its DDR5 counterparts, though we saw some faster times in different tests (Blender, for example). Our board ran the DDR4 3600 sticks at stock and our DDR4 4000 kit without issue.