Asus’ ROG Maximus XIII Extreme and Extreme Glacial are full-featured Z590 motherboards that include robust power delivery, premium audio with a DAC, five M.2 sockets, 10 GbE and integrated Wi-Fi 6E. The Glacial includes a custom waterblock. While pricing is tough to take, the Extreme ($899) and Extreme Glacial ($1499) represent what flagship-class motherboards should be.
Two premium motherboards sit atop Asus’ Z590 product stack, and we’ll be looking at both in depth below: the ROG Maximus XIII Extreme and its liquid-cooled big brother, the Extreme Glacial. Priced at $899 and $1499.99 respectively, these boards are undoubtedly tough on your wallet, but they offer some of the best hardware and one of the most comprehensive feature sets around. This includes incredibly robust power delivery, a whopping five M.2 sockets, dual Thunderbolt 4/Type-C ports, watercooling monitoring capabilities, premium audio, enough buttons and switches to keep the most skilled overclocker busy, and of course a high-end appearance that looks great with most build themes. The Glacial kicks it up a notch by adding a custom waterblock that cools the CPU, VRMs and Chipset.
We’ve paired these two boards together in one review because for all intents and purposes, the only difference between them (outside of the price of course) is the custom-made EK water block on the Glacial. Once you strip all the heatsinks, blocks and shrouds off, the underlying PCB is, mostly, the same. PCIe slot orientation and some other minor things are different, but outside of that, these two boards have the same features.
