Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “ASROCK Z790 NOVA Motherboard”.
I’M going to take a look at the z790 Phantom gaming Nova, Wi-Fi Wi-Fi 7. Well, it’s to go with the Intel new 14th generation CPUs that they’re launching. Let’S take a look at this motherboard. This is new from azrock, I mean z790 is not a new chipset, but the 14th gen Intel Core architecture. Cpus are it’s a it’s a refresh the Raptor Lake refresh 13th gen was Raptor Lake. This is 14th gen, but it it’s a refresh. What do you get for the refresh 6.1 GHz and somewhat increased power consumption? If you really let the CPU do whatever it wants? 400 amps power delivery yeah this thing can do it. It’S a 20 plus 1 one power delivery system on the Nova. So that’s! What’S going on with Phantom gaming, a heavy motherboard now, in addition to the motherboard in the Box, you get a fancy movable antenna. This is good. This is exactly the kind of Wi-Fi 7 stuff you should see for a Wi-Fi 7 motherboard. You don’t want just you know, two little pieces of plastic. You want a nice antenna.
This is a nice antenna, Wi-Fi 7 there’s also a temperature sensor in the Box. You get three of those, so you can put temperature sensors around your system wherever you like, which is nice cuz. These will show up in Hardware info 64. You’Ve also got an RGB breakout cable. So if you want to use a special RGB controls, 1, two 3 – you got three headers for for one, which is pretty awesome. You’Ve also got some SATA cables, as well as a GPU holder bracket thing, so this is designed to screw into the ATX motherboard mounts this mechanically fastens directly to your case, and then this little arm is adjustable.
So it’ll hold your GPU. It’S basically connects the far end of your GPU to your case mechanically, and the mother board has been designed so that components on the motherboard are not in the way of this bracket. This is actually a really cool feature from ASRock.
You should check out my earlier videos on this mounting bracket. We’Ve also got a bunch of m.2 mounting hardware: a phantom gaming sticker Phantom gaming key cap, the Cherry MX style plus and our installation manual. This is a ddr5 platform. It will support up to ddr5 7800. I don’t even have memory that fast. I’Ve only got memory up to 7200. Well, we’ll have to test that and see how that goes as one PCI 5 slot x16, that’s wired directly to the CPU one pcie4 x16, that’s X4 to the chipset and one pcie3 slot.
That is just by one lane, something that’s appropriate for say a sound card. This is a 7.1 Channel HD audio codec based around the realtech alc 4082. So this is a pretty upgraded audio solution. It also includes the nemic audio delivery system, so it’ll drive high impedance headphones and deliver High Fidelity sound. It also has Optical spdif out at the rear eye open panel. We have two antenna ports, one HDMI port; One display port 1.4 that comes from the built-in igpu, the optical spdif, that I mentioned before two USB 3.2 gen, 2×2 type c ports. Those are 20 gbit. Four USB 3.2 Gen 2 type A ports; those are 10 gbit, 3 USB 3.2 gen 1. Those are 5 gbit, two USB 2.0 ports, one RJ45 L. This is a killer Nick, but it’s Intel killer. Nick 2 and a half gigabit clear, camos button. One line out Jack and one microphone audio jack.
Now two of these USB ports are lightning gaming, ports, which means they support higher power delivery and they they have a separate. You know: sort of low noise power delivery system. So if we’re going to use a USB audio deck, that would be the ports to put those in now. Our storage configuration here is pretty interesting.
We do have PCI E5 storage, two of them. In fact one of them will share Lanes if m.2 one is occupied. Pci E1 will downgrade to X8, so don’t use that m.2 slot unless you’re absolutely out of all of your other m.2 slots. But the good news is, it does run a Gen 5. Now M22 is connected directly to the CPU and that will run a gen 4×4 mode, so it’s pcie Gen 4 to the CPU in that slot, but it’s not Gen 5. This motherboard has four more m.2 slots which are all connected to the chipset.
You can use two of those without bottlenecking. Two of them run in gen. 4X4 mode M25 will also do sata 3, so that one is the one you want if you’ve got a SATA m.2, but uh M25 and 6 will also run at pcie 4 by Gen 4. This motherboard has two 8 Pin CPU power connectors.
I definitely recommend connecting both of those if you’re running an i7 or an I9 processor definitely recommended. This motherboard also has a lot of four pin fan headers cuz you’re, going to need it for this 14th gen CPU. If you got an i7 or 99 for front panel, USB connections, we’ve got one 30 pin one type-c and two USB 2 connections at the bottom edge of the motherboard, the usb2 connections at the bottom edge of the motherboard.
Those are always really nice for water pumps. That have USB or USB controllers for fan or LCD screens or whatever, because they don’t typically need to be very fast, like the internal status display screens. You never know.
You’Ve also got a right angle, 30 pin connector. So if you’ve got a case, that’s got four type: A ports for the front, such as The Cooler Master super tower case. We reviewed a while ago, where it’s got four type: A ports plus type c. You can run all of those ports off of this motherboard.
Also really appreciate that azrock includes a block diagram of this motherboard in the manual if you’re, considering doing a build where you’ve got a lot of peripherals and you want to connect them together. A certain way always check the motherboard manual to see, if there’s a block diagram, to understand how everything is going to connect. If you’re going to do something like M2 raid uh, you know with this motherboard, you could run to highspeed m.2 but you’re looking to run Gen 5 m.2 and not sacrifice any of your. Your Gen 5 Lanes um for your GPU, then you’re, probably going to need to upgrade to a more expensive motherboard if you’re going to run Gen 4 raid zero or raid one, then this is a pretty good motherboard to be able to do that, even though one Of them is going to be connected through the chipset you’re, not going to bottleneck, or you could elect to run your GPU at X8 and have direct CPU connections for your m.2 storage.
It’S up to you, but some of the choices there were made by the design of the motherboard that you don’t have anything to do with. So you got to check those things in the motherboard. Also, what do you do with so many m.2 slots? Well, there’s four m.2 slots that are hanging off of the chipset. We recently took a look at these tcreate. These are gen, 3×4, m.2 and they’re only a terabyte, but they are insanely inexpensive and they have a very high wear endurance and they have a 5-year warranty from Team group. So you can get four of these for less than $ 200 and you could run four of them in a raid zero off of the chip set, and it’s not really going to bottleneck. You wouldn’t use that as your boot Drive you’d use that as your game drive, but you get get 4 terab of storage for less than a couple of hundred bucks and each Drive individually is only 2.1 GB per second, but for a game drive four of them. Aggregated together is great now, if one of them dies you’re going to lose all the information on that. But if you can redownload your games from the cloud who cares, raate zero is fine. You would set that up with uh in Intel RAID. You set up a vmd. I’Ve done a video on that in the past. It still applies here.
You can follow the same video and create a raid zero volume for your games. For your boot Drive. You shouldn’t use it as a boot drive because you’ll be better off with a single drive, that’s faster and better and more tuned to being a boot drive versus rate zero.
You can run that in one of the two remaining m.2 slots. Well, if you use it in the ones connected directly to the CPU, you’ve got one m.2 slot empty, and your GPU is still going to run at 16 Lanes wide, which is pretty awesome. Demonstration of the really awesome, GPU mounter thing I like what asrock’s doing here for the GPU holder – it’s really good oops, so this bracket mounts right to the front of the motherboard, but mechanically it’s fastened to your case, which is great because you don’t want your GPU Mechanically fastened to your motherboard it’ll break it now, where oh, where will I get a giant GPU? Is that an OC formula 6950x from azrock? Yes, it is so again imagine this is mounted inside your case. There’S a metal bracket screwed to your case, holding the far end of your GPU you’ve got the near end or the connector end of your GPU screwed into the case sure, but the other end is just kind of fle free floating. I mean GPU sag. It’S all about GPU sag.
Well with this bracket. It’S it sits on the metal lip here which is adjustable up and down for thick gpus, and this will hold it for you, which is pretty awesome. So if you’re thinking z790 Nova, that sounds familiar, we did mention it briefly in our compex coverage gosh that feels like that was years ago now, but the Raptor Lake refresh Intel basically telegraphed.
This was coming all the way back in June in computex, so the z790 Nova has been out for a while, but it’s been out for a while with knowledge that intel was going to release these CPUs that demand 325 Watts for their maximum potential to be Unleashed. So ASRock had some time to get things polished and and right as far as motherboards and platform launches go we’re at a unique time. If you normally only buy stuff, that’s a generation or two behind for the stability now’s your time to shine, we’re one of those unusual Crossroads where you can buy a 14th gen CPU and get it for a tried and true platform.
This isn’t really a new platform. I mean it is a new platform and it’s a new CPU, but it’s also the second generation stuff for that, and it’s also the fastest stuff you can get so if you buy for stability. This has the year plus of stability tuning built into it, but also, if you buy, for the bleeding edge, this is bleeding edge.
Usually, when you buy for stability, you lose out a little bit on performance, but that’s not the case here, which is pretty exciting and you can buy even higher end. You know you could go for the the z790 taiichi because there have been a few updates to that as well or other z790 motherboards to get an even higher end higher performance scenario. That’S totally fine, but uh.
The z790 Nova is pretty competent for running up to and including the I9 at its full unlocked potential. Vrm cooling lots of m.2 connectivity just depends on what you’re looking for for your build. I what this level one it’s been a quick look at the z790 Nova handson with 14th gen Intel I9 CPUs, I’m signing out. You can find me in the level .