THE Z790 DARK K|NGP|N

Details make a great product and the full-size plastic guide EVGA offers can be extremely useful when building or tweaking your system.

Just like the Z690 DARK the Z790 DARK has a professional/industrial look which i really like.

The massive aluminum heatsink paired with two 40mm high-speed fans should be enough to keep the 21-phase digital VRM temperatures in check.

On the other hand, the Z790 chipset is passively cooled by a medium sized heatsink covered with a piece of plastic that has the K|NGP|N logo on it.

By using just two DIMM slots the Z790 DARK KINGPIN can support DDR5 modules up to well over 8000MHz in speed (64GB max capacity).

Typically, at the top left corner we find two LED post indicators, safeboot and clear CMOS buttons, two CPU PWM fan headers, 4 ARGB headers, and the power on/off and reset buttons.

Both the motherboard power connectors and the USB 3.0 front panel connector are angled for easier reach.

Next to these angled connectors we find the BIOS update USB port and the PCIe disable, CPU slow-mode and triple-bios switches.

The G2 and 8 SATA data connectors are all placed right next to each other at the lower right of the motherboard.

The internal USB headers, onboard speaker and the PCIe 4.0 x4 slot are all located on the lower end of the motherboard under rubber covers and next to the extra 6-pin PCIe power connector (according to EVGA this connector provides dedicated power to the PCIe x16 slots, augmenting the +12V power provided by the 24-pin and the GPU directly).

As mentioned earlier the Z790 DARK K|NGP|N sports two reinforced PCIe 4.0 x16 slots.

Removing the large heatsink at the center reveals the three Gen4 M.2 sockets.

Moving at the rear I/O we find the clear CMOS and BIOS update buttons, PS/2 connector, two USB 3.2 Gen1 ports, two Antenna connectors, five USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, 10GbE Ethernet port, 2.5GbE Ethernet port, USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C port and the 7.1 analog/digital audio output.

I believe that all high-end and above motherboards should come with backplates so the fact that EVGA has been doing this (for the most part at least) is a good thing and yes, the Z790 DARK K|NGP|N motherboard is no exception.

As mentioned earlier for this test I’ll be using the Intel Core i9-13900k paired with Team Groups latest T-Force RGB 32GB 6400MHz CL40 DDR5 kit and the 1TB NFP425 SSD by Neo Forza.

With the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT installed the system is now ready to boot.