Asus ROG STRIX Z490-E GAMING ATX LGA1200 Motherboard (ROG STRIX Z490-E GAMING) – PCPartPicker

This MB is fantastic. Visually appealing, even if you don’t want RGB like I did. Comes with a cute little VRM fan that doesn’t actually do anything yet as I haven’t even gotten the heatsinks warm. Only comes with 2 chassis fan headers so you may have to buy a fan controller if you go with air cooling instead. This MB is aimed more towards AIO/liquid.

The only issue I’ve had is with the BIOS fan smoothing function being useless, which is apparently a consistent issue with ASUS BIOS. If your fans are ramping up and down constantly, just use software like FanControl to sort it out. Otherwise the BIOS is very good and has a lot of functionality, more than I would probably need.

It will also download Armoury Crate by default on first boot into Windows, so disable it in BIOS first. Armory Crate was mostly garbage for me and the drivers it wanted to install were out of date.