Verdict and Conclusion
Buying a Z790 motherboard doesn’t necessarily need to cost you an arm or a leg. Sure, a mainstream board may lack certain enthusiast features, but if you don’t plan to overclock or use the system for heavy photo editing/video rendering, then the ASRock Z790 PG Lightning WiFi might be the right motherboard for you.
It supports all Intel Core processors including the latest 14th gen, the previous 13th gen & older 12th Gen. And what’s more, it also supports Intel XMP 3.0 profiles, and can run higher DDR5 memory speeds of up to DDR5-7600+ OC.
The ASRock Z790 PG Lightning WiFi now comes with Intel’s Killer E3100G 2.5G LAN and WiFi 6E + Bluetooth (the previous model uses Realtek 2.5GbE LAN and no WiFi).
For expanson, there’s 1 x PCIe 5.0 x16 slot for your graphics card (with Surface Mount Tech), 1 x PCIe 4.0 x16 slot, and 2 x PCIe 3.0 x1 slot.
For storage, it has 6 x SATA3 ports, 3 x Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4 x4) slots for your SSDs, but sadly no Blazing M.2 (PCIe Gen5) slot. However, it does comes one M.2 heatsink that features a quick release latch for easy mounting of your SSDs, which I really like.
The motherboard also features a unique eDP port which allow users to connect the optional ASRock 13.3” LCD Side Panel kit.
In our tests, used an Intel 14th Gen Core i9-14900K processor, along with 32GB of Lexar ARES RGB DDR5-7200 ram and a Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card. We managed to get pretty decent scores in all of our benchmarks, including a Cinebench R23 scores of 35,825 (multi core) and 2,251 (single core). For PCMark 10, we got a score of 10,863, and a score of 13,025 for PassMark 10.
For UL’s Procyon Photo Editing Benchmark, we got a score of 10,349 and 10,485 for the video editing suite. For 3DMark Speed Way and Port Royal, we got a score of 6,195 and 16,030 respectively. And finally, for Timespy and Firestrike, we got decent scores of 29,108 and 48,682 respectively.
I’m pretty surprised with the motherboard’s overall performance, and I have to say I’m more than happy with it. The ASRock Z790 PG Lightning WiFi may lack certain features found on more expensive enthusiast motherboards, but it certainly makes up for it in terms of affordability and performance.
Priced around USD $250, the ASRock Z790 PG Lightning WiFi motherboard is an absolute bargain. You can buy it right now from Amazon –
Final Words:
If you’re a mainstream user who’s after an affordable Z790 motherboard without compromising on performance, then look no further. There’s no need to get an enthusiast motherboard, when the ASRock Z790 PG Lightning WiFi offers everything you need without breaking your bank. Now you can use the savings, and put it towards that graphics card you’ve always wanted!
You can buy the original ASRock Z790 PG Lightning motherboard for around USD $200 from Amazon – https://amzn.to/3u8PXAw
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