BIOSTAR, mostly known for their motherboard products, have revealed their own set of Z690 mobos for the 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs announced a couple of days ago.
Although the company technically announces 3 boards consisting of the Z690 VALKYRIE, Z690A VALKYRIE, and Z690GTA, only details for the top end Z690 VALKYRIE has been revealed in a practical sense so let’s get to that.
Presented as BIOSTAR’s premium selection, the Z690 VALKYRIE is fitted with a 20-phase DrMOS power delivery system with digital PWM handling up to 105A for a clean and stable power output while hosting a total of 4 DIMM slots dedicated to DDR5 that can support up to an official speed of 5600MHz. To provide a better heat dissipation cycle, the radiator is made with a fin shape while a full copper base and metal backplane design are applied to make things easier. 3 PCIe slots can be found with the top 2 being PCIe 5.0 x16 and x8 while the 3rd one is the PCIe 4.0 x16 while the shrouded M.2 slots make up a total of 4.
Referencing the back I/O part and there’s a total of 7 USB-A 3.2 Gen2x2 and 1 USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port while the Ethernet port is rated for 2.5Gb and the antenna, of course, is made for the Intel WiFi 6E wireless connection. There’s also a couple of neat inputs like 7.1 ALC1220 audio channels and SPDIF optical fiber to handle all your premium sound equipment. Video output wise, it uses a jack-of-all-trades philosophy because all of them are unique which are DisplayPort 1.4, DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 2.1, and HDMI 1.4.
Availability
Although BIOSTAR didn’t give us any info about the pricing and launch date of the Z690 VALKYRIE, we are suspecting that they’ll be fully revealed in one go when the Z690A VALKYRIE and Z690GTA follow the step in the near future.
