Thursday, October 14th 2021

Asus ROG Strix Z690-I Gaming WiFi Leak Shows Off Stacked Board Design
Over the past few generations of Mini-ITX boards we've seen Asus add more and more stacked layers and its upcoming ROG Strix Z690-I Gaming WiFi seems to be taking this to the next level with what appears to be no less than three stacked layers on top of the main PCB. What can be seen from the side-shot of the boards is that there's at least one PCB for audio as well as what appears to be an ARGB and fan header, as well as what should be two layers for M.2 NVMe SSDs with associated heatsinks.
The rest of the pictures of the board have been put through some kind of filter which makes it hard to ascertain any details, although we can spot a USB type-C and USB 3.0 front panel connector. Asus has carried over the VRM heatsink from the Strix Z590-I Gaming WiFi by the looks of things, although it seems like the extra NVMe slot has been implemented on the cost of two SATA ports. We'll have to wait until the official unveiling to find out the full details, which should be sometime next month.
Source:
Videocardz
The rest of the pictures of the board have been put through some kind of filter which makes it hard to ascertain any details, although we can spot a USB type-C and USB 3.0 front panel connector. Asus has carried over the VRM heatsink from the Strix Z590-I Gaming WiFi by the looks of things, although it seems like the extra NVMe slot has been implemented on the cost of two SATA ports. We'll have to wait until the official unveiling to find out the full details, which should be sometime next month.
41 Comments on Asus ROG Strix Z690-I Gaming WiFi Leak Shows Off Stacked Board Design
btw...why no one talks about that lga 1200/115x mounting holes....
Also, that thing, while inedible, is still thicker than any Subway sandwich could ever hope to be, LOL :D:roll:
this one, $370 euro before tax.
As for this board though ... am I the only one who can't see the third layer? The first m.2 slot is on the same board as the audio+fan/RGB headers. The second is above. Is there a third? If you count the m.2 drives then there are four, but those aren't part of the board. Still, nice to see smart compact solutions like this that don't require a gargantuan rear cutout or removing the motherboard to add/replace a drive. Definitely not suited for low profile SFF heatsinks though - either you'll have clearance issues or you'll have airflow issues in that tiny well where the CPU lives. Yep, the "extreme noise reduction + excessive sharpening, with some weirdly wonky algorithms thrown in" filter. It's a classic!
Both of those things ask for reduction in cables coming from the power supply. You don't get 12 lanes in a GPU - they aren't designed like that. Either you get 8 or 16.
A lot of the time you get "thank you for your suggestion" reply, but you know they have no intention of considering it.
When you work the industry, you see a lot of things and you get a lot of ideas and you hope that someone maybe, one day, would think it was a good idea, but alas...
So far I have only ever had one idea implemented and that was well over a decade ago by CM when they added one vertical slot of expansion brackets to their cases, something Fractal-Design later copied. Now you have it everywhere because of vertically mounted graphics cards.
It's far more common to see companies remove features to meet a price point, than to add features and do upsells.