You have nearly definitely heard the bombshell information that EVGA is leaving the graphics card enterprise totally over a purported private dispute with NVIDIA. The corporate insists that it is not going anyplace regardless of graphics playing cards comprising some 78% of EVGA’s income, not less than for now. Nearly as if to show that time, EVGA is among the many distributors displaying off motherboards for Intel’s brand-new Z790 Raptor Lake platform.
There are two boards as a part of the announcement: the EVGA Z790 DARK Okay|NGP|N, and the EVGA Z790 Categorised. They differ within the particulars, however each boards are radically completely different from most motherboards available on the market: they characteristic CPU sockets rotated 90 levels, repositioned reminiscence slots to accommodate, and nearly all the connectors are edge-mounted—together with not solely SATA and USB plugs but additionally ATX energy, a pair of EPS12V connectors, and even not less than one fan connector.
Whereas each boards are very strictly high-end merchandise geared toward overclockers, the Categorised board might be the one most customers can be extra curious about. That is largely because of having a full 4 DDR5 DIMM slots, because the Okay|NGP|N board is proscribed to simply two slots, owing to that mannequin’s concentrate on excessive overclocking. Granted, filling out all 4 DIMM slots will lead to decrease reminiscence speeds. Whichever board you select, you get a pair of PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, though the Okay|NGP|N board helps auto-switching as a way to use a GPU put in within the backside slot on the full x16 pace if wanted.
Different shared connectivity consists of eight SATA ports, 2.5-Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, and seven.1 analog audio outputs. The Okay|NGP|N board will get a further 10 GbE jack and three M.2 SSD slots, whereas the Categorised mannequin has a pair of USB Kind-C ports onboard that assist DisplayPort connectivity along with 20 Gbps USB4. “This board is unbelievable,” says its namesake, Vince “Okay|NGP|N” Lucido.
After all, these overclocking oriented boards have onboard diagnostic readouts, energy and reset buttons, in addition to ridiculously overbuilt energy supply {hardware}. The extra modest Categorised mannequin comes with a 19-phase VRM and a 12-layer PCB, whereas the top-end DARK Okay|NGP|N will get a 14-layer PCB and a 21-phase VRM that give the board what EVGA describes as “extreme overclocking assist.”
This launch is attention-grabbing, as a result of EVGA is never among the many first distributors to offer motherboards for brand new platforms. Sadly, EVGA uncared for to offer pricing or availability data for its upcoming system platters, however you possibly can join updates in the event you completely need one as quickly as they’re accessible. Primarily based on the characteristic set of those boards and the pre-order pricing of Z790 fashions that went up on Newegg at the moment, we would not anticipate them to be low-cost.
