AORUS Z790 Tachyon:
The bundle:
A little tour through the bundle of this AORUS Z790 Tachyon to see if it benefits from “special items”. Overall, we find a pretty standard bundle with the traditional SATA cables, Wi-Fi antenna, stickers, etc. So you won’t find anything extra in the box.
In the end, for a card dedicated to overclocking, this is not what interests us the most. Note however that in my sample received, there is no manual of the motherboard, which is quite surprising but it should certainly be the case with the retails cards, ie sold in the shops.
Even if it is not yet available in France, it has just made an appearance in Finland. Indeed, the card is currently on sale at 759.90 euros at a Finnish retailer. This price seems to us coherent compared to the price of the ROG APEX version from Asus at 820 euros.
Architecture:
The AORUS Z790 Tachyon motherboard is architected around Intel’s latest chipset, the Z790. This motherboard retains the previous generation socket, the LGA-1700, as the processor has grown in size since the Rocket Lakes. With this Z790 version, this is the third Tachyon motherboard to be launched. The first one was built around the Z590 chipset, and it’s a board designed by Hi Cookie, the famous overclocker who manages the manufacturing and debugging of BIOS.
The Z790 chipset supports PCIe 5.0 offering higher storage performance than the previous generation as well as DDR5 support.
The different heatsinks:
The dimensions of the board are 305 mm x 270 mm, which corresponds to the E-ATX format. The dominant colors on the PCB are black and grey. The design of this “Tachyon” version is still quite particular. Aesthetically, it looks quite similar to the Z690 version, but it is mainly the part dedicated to the buttons for overclocking that is organized differently.
Let’s start the tour with the radiators which are three in number!
First of all, the two radiators located on the top of the motherboard and which surround the socket. They cover the power supply stage and are connected by a heat pipe. Note that the left radiator has a part that covers the external connectors. You will be able to see this better when disassembling the board a little later in the article.
The third is the one that covers the chipset and has a large surface but a low height to allow easy placement of graphics cards.
The AORUS logo and a very light RGB backlight are present. We are here on a completely passive system.
Four SSD slots:
Two aluminum plates, whose cutout perfectly matches the one on the chipset, cover the four M.2 SSD slots on the PCB. As you can see, the SSD slots all have a thermal pad to optimize heat dissipation. Without a manual and information on the AORUS website, it is very difficult for us to know how they are wired.
As soon as we have the information, we will of course update this unboxing. By the time this article is published, it should be.
The socket and PCIe:
The space around the socket is very well cleared and it will be quite very easy to isolate with rubber for testing under LN2. On the other hand, the card only has mounting holes for LAG-1700.
This Tachyon should logically support dual channel memory kits up to 7800 MHz+ (OC) and for a maximum amount of 64 GB. As you can see, there are only two memory slots. This is deliberate since the idea is to overclock the memory as much as possible, which is easier with two slots than with four. Remember that this card is 100% intended for overclocking. The two slots are far enough apart to be able to use a cooling kit under LN2.
There are two PCIe 5.0 ports, but unfortunately we do not have any information about them at the moment. To power all this, the card has a 24-pin flat connector and two 8-pin connectors next to the power stages.
AORUS seems to have reworked the retention system that releases your graphics card. This was a concern we had with the previous generation when a heat sink was too close to the first PCIe slot. We’ll be watching closely in our test to see if it works better.
