While we have this board since mid-October, I had put the test on standby because the BIOS was not fully satisfactory and we were already receiving the first Z790 motherboards at that time. Last weekend, after hearing a lot of good things about the latest BIOS 2.05 and the Eleet software update, I thought it was time to test it again. So with our Raptor Lake i9-13900K and A-die Teamgroup Delta RGB 7200 MT/s CL34 memory we decided to see how these components performed. And to say the least, I was not disappointed, far from it. We are perhaps looking at the best card on the Z690 chipset, and one that competes with the Z790 chipset without difficulty.
As a reminder, we were able to get our hands on a sample of the EVGA Z690 DARK in KingPiN version thanks to Jacob from the EVGA US team. The last EVGA motherboard test was the AM4 version, with the excellent X570 DARK.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to buy this board on the European continent. Members of our Discord bought it via the official EVGA US ebay page at the US price of $829.99 but that makes a total of about 1085 euros with shipping, VAT and taxes in France.
DARK and DARK K|NGP|N series:
Before starting the test of this motherboard, let’s go back in time on the “DARK” series. It is in 2013 that EVGA offers the first model, the X79 DARK which put EVGA back on the right track after disappointing models and especially that lacked follow-up in terms of BIOS. This series will be headed and designed in large part by Vince, aka KingPiN , and TiN. Since 2013, EVGA regularly offers unique models that are part of this series with the latest, this EVGA Z690 DARK.
The cards of the “DARK” series are designed in the same spirit as the “KingPiN” graphics cards, that is to say, to obtain the best performance and to offer tools to test them under liquid nitrogen. The stock of these cards is often very low, although for once a larger number of Z690s seem to have been released. At the time of publishing this article, a first batch of the Z790 DARK KingPiN has been sold.
