ASRock Z790I Lightning WiFi review
The Mini-ITX form factor has a dedicated fan following, and you can count me among them. Most manufacturers offer a range of Mini-ITX boards and in fact, Mini-ITX has mostly displaced MicroATX from the premium segment, and not just for motherboards, but cases too. There are some stunning little Mini-ITX cases on the market these days.
There's life in the old LGA 1700 dog yet.
Even though anticipation is slowly building towards next generation LGA 1851 motherboards and Arrow Lake processors, there's life in the old LGA 1700 dog yet. 12th, 13th, and 14th Generation processors will be available in one form or another for years to come, and a late LGA 1700 era board will remain desirable, especially if it includes updated controllers, a capable VRM, and optimizations for high speed DDR5 memory.
The ASRock Z790I Lightning WiFi is a third generation LGA 1700 board. It's been given some tweaks and an upgraded power delivery subsystem that's better able to handle the even steeper demands of 14th Generation Intel CPUs.
At $279, the Z790I Lightning WiFi is quite fairly priced. At the time of writing, UK and AU pricing are not yet available. Even though they are not exactly apples-to-apples, that price is very competitive indeed when compared to the likes of the Gigabyte Z790I Aorus Ultra and MSI Z790I Edge.
It's also worth noting that ASRock has released a B760I Lightning WiFi alongside the Z790I version I am reviewing here. The B760I version costs $185 and is very similar in terms of spec.
Despite its diminutive size, there's a lot to cover spec wise. In my opinion, the highlight is the support for DDR5-8600+ memory. That might not mean a lot to gamers right now, but with JEDEC recently extending the DDR5 spec to 8800MT/s, faster memory is coming in the years ahead, so that ability will come in handy. Most ITX motherboards get a memory speed bump from having just two memory slots, a feature that's common to high-end overclocking boards. Two slots will limit you to 96GB of
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