ASUS ROG Maximus Z890 Extreme Motherboard Review

There has been a land rush to occupy open board space no longer consumed with PCI Express slots with M.2 drive connections.  The Maximus Z890 Extreme supports a total of six M.2 NVMe drives.  Four of them can be found on the PCB with two more supported in the DIMM2 module. 

Expansion slots total three.  The longer 16x slots support PCI Express Gen5 and will be split x8/x4/x4 when certain M.2 drive locations are populated or a full X16 when only a single graphics card is installed.

You will find the primary NVMe drive location near the CPU encased under an extremely large heatsink.  Not only to help ensure that speedy Gen5 NVMe drives stay cool but also to show off a new drive latch feature.

Instead of clumsy screws or hard to use twist locks the heatsink is held down with a very large slide lock.  One end of the cooler slots into the bracket on the motherboard while the other end drops straight down and is locked in place with a latch moving in the opposite direction.

A very elegant way to install the heatsink that doesn’t require any specialized instructions.

Next to the memory sockets is the DIMM 2 slot which is a dedicated slot for M.2 drives.  The riser card supporting these drives is pictured below.

DIMM 2 is double sided and supports a variety of M-Key M.2 drives up to 22110 in length.  While the DIMM 2 card is very creative is has a side benefit of removing the drives from being between the PCI Express slots where they can be exposed to frost and condensation while overclocking and also opens the area up for custom LED lighting effects.