Are you planning on a Coffee Lake build and have a penchant for massive overclocking? EVGA would like to show you its Z390 Dark motherboard. If the massive heatsinks atop it weren't enough of a clue, this circuit slab is packed to the gills with power-handling goodies, and pro overclocker Luumi has already used it to break the eight-core Cinebench R15 world record by pushing a Core i9-9900K to 6.987 GHz. If you bleed liquid helium and live for overclocking records, read on.
First up, the company says there's a 17-phase VRM sitting underneath all those heat sinks. The spice flows into it from a pair of eight-pin EPS connectors. There are only two DIMM slots sitting atop the CPU socket, likely to keep trace lengths as short as possible for maximum overclocking stability. We can also spot what appears to be an extra six-pin PCIe power connector on the board's lower left edge for keeping multiple graphics cards happy in extreme OC setups.
There are onboard power, reset, and clear-CMOS buttons for when you inevitably push the CPU too hard, along with two individual alphanumeric displays that can show temperature and voltage info coming in from multiple sensors scattered around the board.
For storage handling purposes, there are a total of eight SATA ports (six from the chipset and two from an ASMedia controller), as well as two M.2 sockets sitting underneath the main PCIe slot. Additionally, you'll find a U.2 connector, likely as a nod towards Optane SSDs. Network connectivity comes by way of two Intel-powered Gigabit NICs and dual-band Wi-Fi (presumably 802.11ac), once again stemming from an Intel chip. EVGA also mentions an E-key M.2 slot, though we figure that's taken up by the Wi-Fi card.
Should you be insane enough to use this board as a daily driver, EVGA puts a whopping six USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports on the back panel. Four Type-A ports come from the Z390 chipset, while another Type-A port and Type-C port run off an ASMedia controller.
The Z390 Dark will let you flash its BIOS without a CPU installed, and there are three BIOS chips because we know that somewhere, somehow, someone will manage to make two of them unbootable. A Creative Sound Core3D audio chip handles sound waves, and eight fan headers should be enough to control your entire house's cooling system.
There's yet no telling when the EVGA Z390 Dark will arrive or how much it'll cost. We figure that the dollar amount likely falls in the "if you have to ask" category.