THERE’S SOMETHING SPECIAL about
reviewing an EVGA motherboard. The
reason is straightforward enough—
these boards are always unique in their
approach to how they do things. If you
take a look at any other manufacturer,
every motherboard layout and design
follows an almost formulaic pattern.
There’s not a whole lot of variance
between any of them. We used to muse
over how all hardware followed a
very similar development pattern. No
manufacturer was willing to break the
mold in an attempt to make something
different—they were all effectively just
minor tweaks to a variant that sells,
regardless of what the marketing bods
try to pitch to you. With motherboards,Breaking
the mold
EVGA
Z390
Dark
In pursuit of perfection.yeah the heatsinks change, and some
connectivity differs here and there, but
on the whole, year in year out, the only
noticeable difference is the not-so-subtle
increase in price. It’s ac tually why we look
for a lack of variance in our testing, rather
than better performance, and consider
that a good thing, not a negative, in the
majority of our mobo reviews.
EVGA seems to have not got the same
memo as the rest, because this board is
something else. From the outset, you can
tell it isn’t exactly your standard layout.
It’s an E-ATX board, there are only two
DIMMs, and both those memory slots
and the CPU socket are rotated by a full
90 degrees counter-clockwise, as is
the power phase design. The VRMs and
MOSfets are situated under that massive
rear I/O heatsink, and EVGA has decided
to move the twin eight-pin EPS power
connectors to just below the 24-pin, with
both sets of power being right-angled to
provide a cleaner look when installing
your cables. On top of that you get a
17-phase power design, meaning there’s
more than enough headroom to overclock
even the very best of Intel’s Coffee Lake
processors, and then there’s the LN2
modes as well (with a myriad options
buried in the BIOS to help overvolt the
board and your chip). Plus, there’s
the dual BIOS debug displays, voltage
reading pinouts, on-board BIOS updateUSB slot, hardware power buttons, and
a multitude of fan headers, with the ones
on the edge right-angled, and the ones on
the board firing straight up. All coupled,
of course, with the additional six-pin PCIe
power on the bottom-left, and a rather
radical cut-out 10-layer PCB holding the
whole thing together. What we’re getting
at is that there’s a lot on this thing that
makes it different.
It’s a quirky board, that’s for sure, but
we can see why EVGA has made these
changes. It’s definitely expensive, but it
does make sense when you think about
who this is for. It’s designed to hit a very
niche audience—well, two audiences
really. The first being those who want to
overclock like world record breakers (if
they aren’t already), and the second for
those looking for something with a little
more flair in the aesthetics department.
The latter of which is kinda ironic,
given there’s zero RGB on this board
(thankfully!). But it truly is a remarkable
design, and one for which we can only
commend EVGA. If only they’d bring this
same flair to X299 and AMD (never going
to happen, but a boy can dream).
Performance at stock is very much
in line with what we’ve seen in the post-
Spectre world; everything falls into
position, with a few notable performance
figures in Fry Render, and power draw
being significantly lower than thein the lab
80 MAXIMUMPC JUN 2019 maximumpc.com