Finished Looks

The ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 features a neutral black aesthetic with silver accents on the chipset heatsinks. The neutral color tones will nicely match a wide range of builds. When powered on, the VRM heatsink connected to the Rear IO section has RGB lighting enabled by default. This is not an LED screen and will always display "HERO" or "ROG" depending on the settings used. By default, it will switch back and forth.

ASUS was also gracious enough to send over the Ryujin II 360 AIO, which was used for the majority of this review. I certainly am not the correct person to give an official review of the AIO, but from my short time with it, it was excellent for its purpose of cooling the CPU and did well with modest overclocking as well.


The Ryujin II 360 AIO will eventually be replaced with the EKWB Quantum Velocity2 for easy long-term open-bench hardware swapping. Nothing personal, ASUS!

Test System

Supporting Hardware

Testing is performed with the newest available version of the BIOS at the time. All BIOS settings related to the CPU are left untouched. XMP is enabled for the memory. However, if the primary, secondary or tertiary memory timings are incorrectly set by the BIOS, it is tested as-is to mimic a standard user. The same goes for the CPU. Unless it is a bug in the current BIOS—i.e., not present in other versions—any and all CPU boost parameters are left alone.