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Asus Prime Z790-A Wifi
Intel i5 13600K
Unboxing
Review + Benchmarks
How’s it going everybody welcome to we do tech and my look at the Asus Prime Z790-A WiFi with the new Intel Raptor Lake i5 13600K. A perfect “budget” high-performance combo.
I already did an unboxing on this board but now we have some performance and temp numbers. But before that let’s quickly go over the board.
Pricing wise the Z790-A is retailing for $240 on Amazon or around R5600 here in South Africa.
The i5 13600K once available should be retailing for around $320 or R7200
Before we begin are you planning to upgrade to the new Z790 and 13th gen or sticking to your current setup? Or maybe even switching to something else?
As I mentioned in the unboxing this is the first Prime board that I have reviewed in a couple of years and I love the design. The space white and black theme looks really nice and would fit perfectly in a white system as I have. It’s not over the top with some designs on the IO cover, chipset and M.2 heat spreaders.
The new Z790 platform features the same LGA1700 socket as we got on the Z690 platform and both are interchangeable with motherboards and CPUs.
As for our CPU, the i5 13600K is going to be the sweet spot between performance and price and still allow us to do some manual overclocking to get a bit more out and have some fun.
The 13600K has 14 cores, 20 threads, 8 of which are performance and 6 efficient cores. The performance cores have a base clock of 3.5ghz and a boost of 5.1ghz. While the efficient cores have 2.6ghz base and 3.9Ghz boost. However, by just using the standard OC switch in the BIOS I has able to get 5.3Ghz on all performance cores and 4.1Ghz on the efficient cores.
As for the VRMs, it’s a 16+1 Phase 60A power stage. Which isn’t massive but it will be enough for a stock 13900K
Moving into memory, the Prime supports a maximum of 128GB on the 4x dual channel DDR5 DIMM slots, with overclocks up to 7000mhz. There is DDR4 boards options
But for our review, Kingston sent over their Fury Beast RGB DDR5 32GB kit with speeds up to 5600Mhz CL40. It looks great and performs as well. So big thanks to Kingston for providing the RAM.
Now if you want to see more motherboard or CPU videos, subscribe because I got a couple coming soon. On this channel and on the second channel linked below.
Dropping down we have 5x PCIe slots, with the top slot being PCIe gen 5 x16 while the second and bottom are PCIe 4 running at x4 speed. The final two are PCIe 3 x1 speeds. Also only the top slot features their armor for again better durability which is needed for some of these hefty RTX 4000 cards.
There is also the Q-Release button that makes it so much easier to quickly remove the GPU.
As for storage, you get 4x gen 4 M.2s. All 4 under heat spreaders and also featuring ASUS’s Q-latch which makes installing m.2s so much easier. There is no Gen 5 support, which really isn’t the end of the world as there aren’t really any gen 5 SSDs available and they will still be super expensive.
Then also you get 4x SATA 3 ports.
For IO, you get a good amount, with 2.5G Ethernet, WiFi 6E and enough USBs, although I would have like 2-4more.
Now just before we get into the fun stuff If you have an idea of a product you would like me to feature either in a video or comparison. Then tag me and the brand in a tweet with what you want and I will try to get it arranged.
To my surprise the i5 13600K at 5.3Ghz, again just using the BIOS Extreme Tuning option should be beating almost all the previous CPUs. I have not tested them with the RTX 4090 system so can’t show results but I have very little dought that this i5 is going to punch way above its class in gaming. However, we will have to wait and see if it’s the same case with the i9 13900K I also have to test and then the mid-range Ryzen 7000 chips later on.
However when it gaming to production and other benchmarks the 13600K falls behind the 7950X, a fair comparison right. But even though it falls behind the twice as expensive CPU it actually beat out the i7 12700K which I was extremely impressed with when it launched. It’s mostly do to the 5.3Ghz scoring higher in single-core and multi-core in Cinebench compared to the 12700K and only losing to the higher core CPUs like 12900 and 7950X.
Cooling
As for cooling, I paired it up with my Corsair H100i Elite LCD which is a 240mm AIO and it kept the 13600K at 5.3Ghz in check around the mid 80s and below 60c in games.
VRM temps from HWinfo looked really good as well peaking at around 60c, if the readout was correct.
Power
Thanks to my upgraded 2000W Platinum power supply from Cooler Master, there were no power issues this time with the RTX 4090. But for the 13600K it reached a max of around 160w, which yeah is quite hungry for an i5. So depending on your GPU, a 500w won’t really be enough anymore for a mid-range system.
Want to save some cash and go Z690?
Get the Asus Prime Z690-A Enstad
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