F E A T U R E // E V G A Z 3 9 0 D A R K
instance, you on ROG board you can
only input 16 characters at most, the
Dark allows for more than double
that amount. So, it’s possible to save
for instance ‘9900K 5.2Ghz DDR4
4300 C14 1.5v wPrime AVX stable
24/7 setting’. On the ROG boards for
instance that would be ‘9900K
5.2Ghz’. If you have many profiles,
this added flexibility comes in handy
Outside of that, I truly do believe
this may possibly the most pleasant
UEFI to use. Visually
it won’t win any awards, but it
is perhaps this simplicity that makes
it such a pleasure to
use. EVGA deserves top marks here,
this UEFI is pure - WIN!
THE EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE
Generally, one doesn’t
come across oddities with a
motherboard in everyday computing
environments. The Dark is no
exception apart from the fact that
unlike several other motherboards I
was testing at the time, it can sleep
and hibernate properly. What I mean
by that is, a number of boards (at
least the ones I had at the time of
testing) were not able to resume
from a 24hour sleep or standby
cycle. The OS would either crash or
the system would have
to POST again almost as if from a
cold boot. The resume would fail and
a restart would be in order.
16 The OverClocker Issue 47 | 2019
This was not the case with
the Z390 Dark and I’ve yet to
experience any such issues at all.
Curiously though, I suspect
the EVGA Z390 Dark to be an
efficient board when it comes
to performance. Consistently at
the default settings (only X.M.P
enabled) it resulted in slightly
better performance than all the
other boards. This was not only
in memory bandwidth tests, but
in the heavy multi-threaded tests
such as CineBench R20. The Z390
Dark was 20 to 40 pts higher than
the rest. This however was not so
obvious when all motherboards
were overclocked to the same
setting (Same VRM switching
frequency, memory timings, North
Bridge etc.). That said, I can't
imagine why someone would buy
this board to just run it at the
regular AUTO settings. So that
advantage isn’t necessarily worth
factoring into your purchasing
decision, I think.
Where the Z390 Dark does
stand out is in the tuning profiles,
specifically the one from Luumi
(please subscribe to this man’s
channel, he is an incredible
overclocker and his stuff is highly
informative) which sets 4300MHz
C14 1.5v. After all this time working
from the ROG DRAM profiles, it is
refreshing to see a brand new highly
tuned DRAM profile. It’s configured