hardware guy
Asus Maximus Hero XI Z390 Experience
I paired this Asus Maximus XI Hero Wifi board with an Intel I5-9600k with cooling via Noctua DH-14. This board is definitely a premium product and beautiful if you are into hardware - its heavy. I had a hard time getting it into my Fractal Define S case, it was like I couldn't push the board tight enough to the back far enough to get the screw holes to line up to the board. After a struggle I managed, maybe it was because of the backplate being part of the board. The memory is G.Skill Trident Z 3600 16-16-16 2x8 gb and was not an issue at all. Video card is an Asus Strix GTX 1070. I had a Samsung 970 pro M.2 drive already set up with Windows 10 to put in it, getting the cover off the M.2 drive bay was a bit of a struggle too, it was really tightened on there by the factory. Another interesting thing is when I first turned the power on (EVGA G2 850w PSU) it was like there was nothing, just dead. I recycled the power switch on the PSU and it came on - whew. Not sure why but wondered if it was part of the board having an extra 4 pin power plug for extreme overclocking. After that there was the software side - the drivers. I could not get the ethernet port to work in Windows 10 and it was quite confusing because I had updated the Bios (to 0506) via the Internet bios choice right away and that worked just fine. The driver installed by Windows automatically for the Intel V-219 was version 12.17.10.8 and this is later than the driver version that Asus Armoury Grate wanted to install (not sure how they get this program to magically install). Windows 10 kept telling me there just was no ethernet connection and I thought maybe there was a hardware port problem as I had tried multiple cables, routers etc. Finally I decided to delete the 12.17.10.8 driver and install the 12.17.10.7 driver manually and all of a sudden it came alive - another whew. I called Asus support on this and I got really good service, I didn't expect that to happen. The Bios on this board is different in c