Here’s hoping that the Z390 Dark
isn’t a single moment of brilliance.
EVGA is clearly capable of producing
the best or one of the two best
offerings on the market. As such,
they’ve set a high bar and their next
offerings, at least form my side, will
be measured against the Z390 Dark.
With the waffle out the way - let’s
get into it.
ON BOARD FEATURES
As the price suggests, the Z390
Dark in terms of comparisons
to other boards is a throw back
to the old Rampage Extreme or
Maximus Extreme, when these two
boards were the pinnacle of extreme
overclocking and gaming boards
from ROG. The Dark has plenty of
functionality you’d not expect on
a pure XOC board, but it
is this functionality that make it
so attractive as a daily driver in
as much as it is for overclocking.
Focusing only on the important
bits, the Z390 Dark has a built in
USB port right on the board near the
24-pin ATX power connector. This
adds so much convenience when
overclocking as saving scores,
updating the bios loading profiles or
software is a breeze and you need
not reach around to the rear IO of to
find an enabled or working USB
port. A small thing that will not be
useful for daily computing, but
worthwhile for extreme overclocking
or when using the system in an open
bench table as I did for this very
review.
The Z390 Dark has not one, or two
but three BIOS chips. One which is
removable so you can recover from
a bad flash or any other misfortune
that may befall
Issue 47 | 2019 The OverClocker 13