ASUS ROG Maximus XII Hero Wi-Fi Z490 Motherboard

Under the Hood

The majority of users won’t go beyond this point when working with ASUS’s ROG Maximus XII Hero. The lowest M.2 slot can be accessed under its own heatsink, but the top two slots require removing the glossy ROG eye cover over the chipset heatsink first to expose the remaining screws. All three slots have pre-installed thermal pads.

Flipping the board over and removing another pile of screws is rewarded with a loud ‘thunk’ on our table as the utterly massive VRM heatsink assembly breaks free of the gentle tack of the thermal pads. The grey heatsink here is for the Aquantia LAN chipset, and the smaller ones in the middle cools the Z490 chipset.

Stripped down, the Maximus XII Hero is quite light. It seems nearly half of the board is devoted to power delivery which explains the massive heatsink assembly.

Everything on the Z490 Hero is black except for the Intel Z490 chipset itself. It carries the Intel Spec Code SRH13.

The key component of powering up to 10 extremely fast cores is ASUS’s 14+2 phase ProCool II VRM running Infineon/IR PowIRStage TDA21462 60A fully integrated power stages.

The 14 main VRM VCC phases and the 2 phases dedicated to the iGPU (well, 8 actual phases that are doubled) are controlled by this ASP1405I digital controller.

The VCCIO and VCCSA minor rails sit below the CPU socket and are controlled by a second ASP1405I digital controller feeding two phases each, one with a pair of ON Semiconductor NCP302045 75A integrated power stages and the other a pair of ON Semiconductor 4C10B MOSFETs each for high side and low side.

The memory channels are powered via a pair of phases from the Digi+ ASP1103 PWM controller.

Towards the Rear I/O area we see Intel’s i219V gigabit LAN chipset, as well as an Asmedia ASM1442K controller that provides the HDMI 1.4b port on the rear.

A little further down hides the Aquantia AQtion AQC111C 5Gb Ethernet controller.

Just behind the audio ports is an Asmedia ASM1074 USB 3.2 Gen 1 5gbps controller providing up to four ports.

ASUS’s Pro Clock II clock generator provides extremely precise clock frequency generation.

Let’s take one more admiring look at the slab of cooling that is the Hero’s 3-zone, heat pipe connected behemoth of a heatsink, shall we?