ASUS ROG Maximus XII Hero Wi-Fi Z490 Motherboard

A Closer Look

The Maximus XII Hero Wi-Fi flips the table and is mostly black with some red accents with lots of subtle details. The rear of the box has a picture of the board in the center, all lit up, with specs and features surrounding it. Opening the box up, we are greeted with a large red ROG eye and the message ‘Welcome to the Republic’. The Maximus XII Hero Wi-Fi is fully visible under the clear protective cover in its own tray.

Like most ROG boards, the pile of accessories in the box is pretty immense. You get the following inclusions:

• User’s manual
• Addressable LED extension cable
• 1 x ROG logo plate sticker
• 4 x SATA 6Gb/s cables
• 1 x Supporting DVD
• 1 x MOS Cooling kit (fan bracket and 40mm x 40mm fan)
• 1 x ROG big sticker
• 1 x Q-Connector
• 1 x Wi-Fi Antenna(s)
• 1 x 80cm Extension Cable for RGB strips
• 1 x ROG Thank you card
• 2 x M.2 SSD screw packages
• 2 x M.2 Rubber Packages
• 1 ROG key chain

With Armory Crate installing LAN drivers for you, and most computers not having an optical disk drive anymore, we think it’s about time to lose the driver disk. Some previous flagships have come with a ROG USB key for the same purpose, and we really liked it.

Asus’s ROG Maximus XII Hero stays within the standard ATX footprint but still offers four memory sockets, twin armored PCIe x16 slots, a PCIe x4 slot in an x16 physical, triple PCIe x1 slots, and a trio M.2 sockets with integrated heatsinks.

The rear of the board is clean with nothing really of note to see.

As with most ROG Maximus boards, the rear I/O is quite extensive. The typical ROG Clear CMOS and USB BIOS Flashback buttons are here, two USB 2.0 ports, one labeled for the BIOS flashback feature, Four USB 3.2 gen 1 5 Gbps ports (blue), four USB 3.2 gen 2 ports (red), and Intel Gigabit and Aquantia 5 Gigabit Ethernet. Display from the iGPU is handled with an HDMI 1.4b port. Intel’s Wifi6 801.11ax is here with a 2×2 config supporting MU-MIMO plus ROG standard SupremeFX powered gold audio ports and optical output. A scratch protective film covers the entire pre-installed rear I/O shield.

Along the top, we have Intel’s new LGA 1200 socket front and center with a nice ROG socket cap, four DDR4 DIMM slots to the front/right, and a 14+2-phase VRM surrounding the top left and bottom sides of the socket.  The new socket supports current 10th generation Intel Core Comet Lake-S chips. There is speculation of support for the upcoming 11^th gen Rocket Lake-S chips. It is NOT compatible with 9^th gen and previous CPU’s, however, all coolers that work with previous LGA 115x sockets will also work with the one.

The bottom half of the board is covered almost completely by the SupremeFX Audio covering and the Chipset heatsink that blends into the heatsinks for three M.2 slots. Two PCIe x16 slots are armored and can operate at x16/x0 or x8/x8 from the CPU. the lower x16 slot is x4 electrical from the PCH as well as the three open-ended PCIe x1 slots. Connections on the board are extensive so let’s start in the lower-left corner and go around.  We get the typical front panel audio header, two RGB headers, ReTry Button, what is listed as a Thunderbolt header but looks a lot more like a Trusted Platform Module header, two USB 2.0 headers, a Thermal sensor connection, three fan headers and the typical front panel I/O pins.

Going up the front edge of the board, you have some headers that are a unique light green color that is the water in & out temp probe connections and a flow meter connection. Above these, you get six SATA ports, a USB 3 front panel header, fan header, USB Type-C header, the main 24-pin power, and a ‘Flex Key’ and Power on button. The Flex key defaults to being a reset button, but can be programmed in the BIOS for several functions, one of which is rebooting directly into BIOS which is handy for those with Fast Boot enabled.

Along the top edge, you have the two-digit Q-Code display, a pair of RGB headers, three fan headers, and the main 8-pin and auxiliary 4-pin CPU power connectors.

The chipset heat sink glows with Aura-Sync enabled RGB.

…as does the mirrored part of the rear I/O cover.