For the foreseeable future, or at the least till Intel’s Rocket Lake is prone to be unveiled, Intel’s primary platform for customers is at the moment the Z490 chipset for Comet Lake. The choices accessible for customers supply a large number of fashions, however maybe one of the vital competitively priced mid-range ones is the ASRock Z490 PG Velocita. Some of the board’s primary options embody twin M.2 slots, eight SATA, 2.5 G Ethernet, and a aggressive 13-phase energy supply. This is our evaluate.
Velocitá: High Velocity
One of ASRock’s newest mannequin connected to its gaming-focused Phantom Gaming collection is the Velocita; an Italian phrase that interprets as velocity, however may very well be interpreted as quick or high-performance. Modeled across the magnificence and aerodynamic nature of a quick automobile with edgy strains, ASRock isn’t any stranger to the ‘motherboard as a hypercar’ idea. The firm used to run a line of ‘OC Formula’ high-end yellow motherboards with quite a lot of high-end options for overclocking together with OLED panels and a water-proof coating.
However ASRock pulled again from these designs, and one may argue the brand new PG Velocita is simply one other motherboard with a barely completely different aesthetic to a daily Phantom Gaming mannequin.
Opting for a dynamic, but contrasting look, the ASRock Z490 PG Velocita makes use of a combination of colours together with black, silver, with pink and gray accents all through. This may very well be construed as a unfavourable, with a number of areas of RGB LEDs that do not permit the faint pink strains throughout the heatsinks and rear panel cowl to be modified, which finally ends up limiting the customizability. Some of the board’s major options embody a pair of Ethernet controllers, one premium 2.5 G and one Gigabit, with twin PCIe 3.zero x4 M.2 slots, eight SATA ports, and help for as much as 128 GB of DDR4-4666 reminiscence. There’s additionally loads of PCIe help with two full-length slots working at x16/+x4, with three PCIe 3.zero x1 slots. On the rear panel, the PG Veloctia makes use of the native USB 3.2 help of Z490 with two ports, a Type-A and Type-C, with 4 further USB 3.2 G1 Type-A ports.
In our efficiency testing, the ASRock Z490 PG Velocita carried out strongly in our system checks with fast non-UEFI POST occasions, one of the best DPC latency outcomes out of the field from all of the Z490 we have examined to date, and good energy consumption at full-loud. Our testing in lengthy idle and idle energy states confirmed the Velocita did run slightly hungry on the facility, but it surely’s not sufficient to be a priority. In our CPU and gaming checks, the Velocita flew by way of most of them at nice velocity.
The ASRock Z490 PG Velocita present process thermal VRM testing
The Z490 PG Velocita is utilizing a 10+2+1 energy supply, with a twelve channel Intersil ISL69269 PWM controller and ten Vishay SiC654 50 An influence levels for the CPU part. While performing our ordinary overclock testing, we noticed tight VDroop management, with ASRock’s firmware routinely making use of Level 1 on the load line calibration settings when altering the CPU VCore voltage. The efficiency was strong and we noticed our POV-Ray benchmark outcomes gradual enhance as anticipated, whereas our energy supply thermal testing additionally confirmed the Veloctia to be a robust performer. It is utilizing a pair of aluminum heatsinks that are interconnected through a single warmth pipe, with a pair of small cooling followers which makes the boards cooling resolution simpler, albeit at the price of audible fan noise when beneath full-load.
The ASRock Z490 PG Velocita has an MSRP of $260 which positions it firmly within the mid-range section of Z490 fashions, with Newegg and Amazon at the moment itemizing the board on sale at $245; this makes it much more aggressive. Other comparable fashions within the value vary embody ASUS’s ROG Strix Z490-A Gaming ($250), ROG Strix Z490-F Gaming ($260),…
