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BIOSTAR Z690A VALKYRIE LGA1700 Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel LGA1700 by stefan @ 2022-03-11

The Z690A Valkyrie from BIOSTAR has impressed us in terms of performance, even when running with the memory at a lower speed of 3600MHz. The UEFI BIOS is well optimized and we can obtain good results with top CPUs from Intel’s Alder Lake generation, while the VRM hardware implementation with 20 phases ensures and a beefy cooling system will keep the temperatures at bay, even while overclocking. The connectivity options are top-notch and besides a lot of USBs on the I/O, we can install more thanks to the internal headers, up to 4 M.2 SSDs and also slower drives such as HDDs or 2.5’’ via the eight SATA ports.

A Closer Look Part II

The beefier VRM area comes with a large heatsink featuring multiple layers:

Further down we do have another plastic shielding, which also covers the audio solution centered around the ALC1220 CODEC from Realtek:

The two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots (which can operate in both x16 and x8 modes), along with the PCIe 4.0 x16 slot (operating in x4 mode) are surrounded by large heatsinks which are split into multiple sections and are fully removable:

The lower PCB area is filled with useful interfaces:

-F_AUDIO header

-3x SYS_FAN 4-pin headers

-a Thunderbolt header

-a COM port header

-two USB 2.0 headers (for connecting controllers, AIOs and so on)

-a F_PANEL header

Near the two-digit display for diagnose purposes, we do have a LN2_SW switch, a TPM_SPI header, a Speaker header but also a BIOS switch (the board also highlights on which BIOS is running with separate LEDs). To the far right of the photo, we will also note a JSPI header:

The board comes with no less than 8 SATA ports:

Near the Clear CMOS button, we do have a F_USB 3.2 Type C 20Gbps header, but also a F_USB 3.2 type A 10Gbps header:

No comments available.

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