The ASRock Phantom Gaming Z790 NOVA WIFI Bursts Onto The Scene
ASRock Offers Everything You Could Need, Apart From A Few Spare Lanes
The ASRock Phantom Gaming Z790 NOVA WIFI motherboard has, among other things, a total of six M.2 slots, one is Gen5 slot while the others are Gen4. That is a lot of PCIe lanes which comes with a small drawback. If you use the Gen5 slot it reduces the PCIe 5.0 slot to 8x, but seeing as how there is a 16x PCIe 4.0 slot as well this shouldn’t have an impact on your graphics performance. It is nice to see that ASRock included heatspreaders for all the M.2 slots.
Power delivery is 20+1+1 VRM with the DrMOS SPS, Smart Power Stage feature and the board is a decent eight layers. On the backplate you will find 2.5GbE networking, two antennae for the WiFi 7, a single USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C, four USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A ports, and five additional legacy USB ports. There are both HDMI and DP out and even a button to clear your CMOS.
That just scratches the surface of this PCB, the rest of the details can be found at The FPS Review.
The layout and construction of this motherboard are what is to be expected for a motherboard in this price range, if not better. This motherboard is covered in heat spreaders, from the 20+1+1 MOSFETs and their active cooling to the chipset to all M.2 slots, there is no shortage of heat spreaders.