Biostar Z690 Valkyrie review - Final Words & Conclusion

Conclusion

While the Biostar Z690 Valkyrie is not the most exciting product on the surface, it does have some positive attributes. It appears to be rather nice (but I would exclude the pink accent). For RGB enthusiasts, there are two addressable and one standard LED strip headers, as well as convenient access to five 4-pin headers in total. The DDR5 slots can accommodate up to 128 GB of RAM and DDR5-6000 memory. Two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots and one 4.0 x16 slot are available on the Biostar Z690 Valkyrie (x4 speed). The audio on this board is adequate, thanks to the Realtek ALC1220 codec (but we would expect a newer one in this budget). Three PCIe 4.0 x4 drives and one 3.0 x4 drive are supported by the M.2 slots. The Biostar Z690 Valkyrie is priced at approximately $599 USD, making it costly. You might be interested to learn that this board features a powerful 19+1 power supply.

DDR5 Memory

Memory compatibility should not be an issue, and most likely will not be, if you stick to freshly issued DIMMs. Well, there’s still not so much available at the market, and the stocks are very low.

Power consumption

The Intel Core i9 12900K doesn’t shine in the power consumption department, at least in a heavy load. In games, it’s a different story (but for that – you need to check Hilbert’s review). It’s a 125 Watt TDP processor. With the system at idle with a GeForce RTX 3080 installed / 32 GB memory / SSD and the Z690 motherboard, I hovered at roughly  Watts in IDLE. The Z690 doesn’t benefit it (and why would it?), so when we stressed the processor, we reached 300 Watts of power consumption. We used the maximum CPU that is available yet for the Z690 chipset.

Performance & tweaking

To get to 5.1~5.2 GHz on all cores, you will probably need at least 1.35, or closer to 1.4-1.45 V on the processor. This makes power consumption grow rather rapidly. If you plan a tweak at that 5.2 GHz mark, you will need LCS. The process of OC that Z690 offers is easy to use: you increase the CPU voltage and multiplier, and that’s it. Another plus for the Intel platform is that they have refined their memory controllers over the years. Pop in anything, select the XMP, and you have more than a 90% chance it’ll work straight out of the box with high-speed memory.  The temperatures of VRMs are good here (also thanks to the VRM fans), even with an overclocked CPU. 

Final words

The Biostar Z690 Valkyrie is the top-of-the-line model in the Z690 range. It features an integrated I/O shield, a solid RGB implementation, PCIe 5.0 compatibility, support for PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives (three can be installed alongside a PCIe 3.0 disk), and eight SATA ports. The power/reset/clear CMOS buttons might also be useful for overclocking. RGB enthusiasts may bling themselves up with one standard and two addressable RGB headers. You receive a 2.5 Gbe Ethernet connection but not a Wi-Fi card (which we find unusual). The appearance may be unsettling for some due to the gold and pink accents. The board is solid and includes the metal cover on the backside). It has excellent power delivery with a 20 phase VRM and 105A MOSFETs, totaling 1995A. That should be plenty for the 12900K and, most likely, the other incoming new socket LGA 1700 processors. Four 40 mm fans cool the power delivery portion, however, the VRMs will remain cool enough even without them. While the audio performance is adequate, we expected something more modern than the ALC1220. Concerning the pricing, it is quite high. 599 USD is the market's high point, and competition is fierce.

As for the things we didn’t like, there are only seven “regular” USB ports and one Type-C port, which cannot be enough for some. There are only three system fans headers. For most users, it should be fine, but if you’d have some more fans in the chassis, you’d need to use the splitters, etc. As mentioned already - the used audio chip is “only” ALC1220; we’d expect more, and the lack of the Wi-Fi card/module is a very serious omission. The Biostar Z690 Valkyrie performed good; the OC was at a good level, so overall we can give an “Approved” award. Why not the “Recommended”? It’s a bit too expensive for what it offers (ALC 1220, lack of Wi-Fi. other then that it’s a solid (especially due to the used VRM) option, but just that.

Handy related downloads: 

• Prime95
• AfterBurner
• AIDA64
• HWiNFO64
• SiSoft Sandra
• 3DMark Download + Time Spy
• CPU-Z
• HWMonitor
  
  
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