Automatically overclock the CPU and support DDR5 8000 memory-Colorful CVN Z790 A
2024-05-20 / tech
In recent years, there have been significant breakthroughs in the design of computer hardware products' appearance. Take the motherboard as an example; in addition to the traditionally common black motherboards, pure white motherboards with white as the main color from the PCB to the heatsinks have emerged one after another, making the originally cold products full of personality and more in line with the needs of young users. However, no matter what kind of design may encounter aesthetic fatigue. If pure white motherboards become tired of looking at, what kind of design should manufacturers bring to users? Perhaps the CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard newly launched by Colorful is a very good answer.
Personality Titanium Gray Starship Design with 14+1+1 Phase Digital Power Supply
Compared with previous products, although the PCB of the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard still uses a white PCB, the design style of its heatsinks has changed greatly. It does not use the silver heatsinks commonly used in previous CVN motherboards. Colorful has introduced a titanium gray color for the first time on the motherboard power supply and M.2 Frost Armor, giving the motherboard a mysterious high-tech feel and making the product more textured overall. At the same time, Colorful has also added more starship elements to the motherboard, such as designing a horizontal instrument and compass on the power supply heat armor, and designing diagonally arranged air ducts based on the launch track of the starship's carrier-based fighter, and matching a 6mm heat pipe to connect the armor of the power supply module. It not only enriches the details of the motherboard but also enhances the overall thermal efficiency of the motherboard. To further enhance the visual effect, Colorful has also designed a row of synchronous ARGB atmosphere lights on the back of the motherboard's 24Pin power supply interface, and there is an independent switch, which is convenient for users to create a personalized and eye-catching computer host.
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The back of the motherboard uses a special PCB painting effect
Although the back of the motherboard is also mainly white, it also incorporates a special PCB painting, CVN military camouflage style silk printing, highlighting the motherboard model, the huge "Z790" "79" numbers, highlighting the attention to detail in Colorful's motherboard design. Therefore, the first impression of this motherboard is not the unity, plainness, and harmony brought by those pure white or black motherboards, but more like an innovative work that strives to add new elements in all aspects and levels.
The motherboard uses a huge 14+1+1 phase power supply design, matched with 90A load MOSFET and 470uF aerospace-grade tantalum capacitors.
Of course, as a motherboard, the most important thing about the product is still the workmanship and materials. Since it uses the Z790 chipset that supports processor overclocking and memory overclocking, the materials of the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard are naturally not bad. The motherboard uses a huge 14+1+1 phase power supply design, with each phase matched with a MOSFET that supports a 90A load. The motherboard's processor power supply part uses multiple 470uF aerospace-grade tantalum capacitors. These capacitors have the characteristics of low equivalent series resistance (ESR), low equivalent series inductance (ESL), and strong ability to reduce ripple voltage. Under high-frequency working conditions, its impedance curve shows the characteristics of an ideal capacitor, and the capacitance is very stable. Moreover, it also has the characteristics of long life and good high-temperature resistance, which is more suitable for working under high-load conditions. This kind of capacitor is generally only seen on high-end board card products.
The highest temperature of the Core i9-14900K on the CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard after half an hour of baking is 85.5°C
According to the official specifications of Colorful, the CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard supports Core processors from the 12th to the 14th generation, including flagship processors such as the Core i7-14700K and Core i9-14900K. According to the actual test of the "Microcomputer" evaluation room, after half an hour of baking the Core i9-14900K with the AIDA64 FPU baking test, the highest temperature of the motherboard's power supply part is around 85.5°C. Although the temperature is not low, during the baking process, the test system did not experience blue screen, restart, or overheating protection shutdown, and the support for the Core i9-14900K is still very stable.The motherboard supports up to 192GB of memory, with memory slots designed with anti-interference metal shielding covers. The nominal memory support speed is DDR5 7800.
It is commendable that the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK motherboard features an 8-layer 1/2 ounce high electrical conductivity PCB, which can effectively reduce line interference and ensure the stability of overclocking and usage. In addition, on the contacts of the CPU socket and memory slots, Colorful has also used thick gold-plated contacts for this motherboard. Gold is an excellent conductor of electricity and has excellent corrosion-resistant properties. Using thicker gold plating can make the motherboard work more stably and avoid poor contact due to oxidation of contacts. The excellent workmanship and materials also give the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK motherboard good memory support capabilities, with a nominal maximum memory support speed of up to DDR5 7800, and it can support large-capacity memory of 24GB or 48GB per stick, supporting a total of up to 192GB of memory, effectively unleashing the performance of the new generation of Core processors.
The motherboard provides multiple expansion slots, two of which are designed with a metal reinforcement layer to strengthen the retention and shear resistance of the slots.
Thanks to the adoption of the Z790 chipset, the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK motherboard also has powerful expansion capabilities. This motherboard not only provides a PCIe 5.0 x16 graphics card slot but also a PCIe 4.0 x4 graphics card slot provided by the motherboard chipset, as well as a PCIe 4.0 x4 slot, allowing users to connect two more graphics cards or video capture cards for AI computing or video production. These two graphics card slots are also designed with a metal reinforcement layer to strengthen the retention and shear resistance, which can better support heavy high-end graphics cards.
The motherboard uses a detachable separate heat sink for SSDs, with thermal adhesive on the back of the heat sink for efficient heat transfer.
In terms of storage, the motherboard provides four PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSD interfaces with an interface bandwidth of 8GB/s, and 4 SATA 6Gbps interfaces, which are sufficient to meet the needs of most users to install various SSDs and hard drives. Moreover, each M.2 SSD interface is equipped with a detachable separate heat sink, allowing each M.2 SSD interface to achieve efficient heat dissipation. The SSD heat sink is thick and beautifully crafted. The back of the heat sink is paired with thermal adhesive with a high thermal conductivity coefficient, allowing the SSD to make close contact with the heat sink and quickly transfer heat to avoid the SSD slowing down due to high temperatures.
The motherboard provides a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C rear interface with an interface bandwidth of 20Gbps on the I/O back panel.
The motherboard's front USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C interface supports 30W PD fast charging.
In terms of I/O interfaces, in addition to HDMI, DP video output interfaces, this motherboard also provides a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C rear interface with an interface bandwidth of 20Gbps. Users can connect USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 mobile solid-state drives like Kingston XS2000, WD_BLACK P50 to this interface, and their sequential read speeds can reach over 2000MB/s, effectively reducing the waiting time for file transfer. It should be mentioned that the motherboard also has a front USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C interface, which not only can transfer data but also supports 30W PD fast charging, which can quickly charge mobile phones and tablets, making it convenient for users.
The Colorful CVN Z790 ARK motherboard provides a white antenna with a magnetic base design for the Wi-Fi 6E module.The audio section of the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard is equipped with an EMI shielding cover, paired with professional audio capacitors.
In terms of functionality, the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard not only features the Realtek RTL8125BG 2.5G Ethernet, which is significantly faster than a gigabit network card, but also comes with the Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211 + Bluetooth 5.3 wireless network card. The biggest upgrade from the previous Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 6E is the addition of the 6GHz frequency band, with a range of 5925-7125MHz, offering more channels, greater capacity, and a substantial increase in throughput. At the 160MHz frequency band, the theoretical transmission bandwidth of the AX211 can be increased to 2.4Gbps, which is a noticeable improvement over the 1.73Gbps bandwidth of Wi-Fi 5. Additionally, Colorful has paired the wireless module with a foldable Wi-Fi white antenna, designed with a magnetic base, making it easy to attach to the case. On the audio front, the motherboard utilizes the Realtek ALC1220 7.1 channel audio chip, complemented by professional audio capacitors, audio separation line design, and the use of EMI shielding cover, which can further reduce high-frequency signal noise interference on the motherboard, delivering a purer audio quality for users.
How We Tested
We then tested the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard with the 14th generation flagship processor: Intel Core i9-14900K. To understand its performance, we specifically used the G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DRAM DDR5 8000 48GB memory kit to test the motherboard's support for high-speed memory and compared its performance with DDR5 6000 memory. After completing the default settings test, we also tested the processor overclocking capability of the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard to see if it qualifies as a Z790 motherboard. To ensure the maximum performance of the processor, we used the Kunlun II 360 all-in-one liquid cooler and the Kunlun MU-1000G ATX3.0 power supply.
Test Platform
Motherboard: Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark
Processor: Intel Core i9-14900K
Cooler: Kunlun II 360 All-in-One Liquid
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DRAM DDR5 8000 24GB x 2
Storage: Yangtze Memory Ti600 2TBGraphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070Ti Super
Power Supply: Kunlun MU-1000G ATX 3.0
Operating System: Windows 11 Professional Edition
Effortlessly supports DDR5 8000 memory
By simply selecting the XMP profile for the memory in the motherboard's ALTER version graphical BIOS, the memory speed can be easily boosted to DDR5 8000 with one click.
Memory performance of the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK motherboard with DDR5 8000 memory
Memory performance of the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK motherboard with DDR5 6000 memory
Firstly, from actual testing, although the official specification only supports up to DDR5 7800 memory, the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK motherboard can actually easily support high-speed memory like DDR5 8000. Users only need to select the XMP profile for the G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB memory in the ALTER version graphical BIOS of the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK, and they can use the low voltage memory of only 1.35V, overclock the memory to DDR5 8000 with one click, and achieve higher memory bandwidth. When paired with DDR5 8000 memory, the memory read, write, and copy bandwidth of the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK motherboard test platform can reach 116.28 GB/s, 98937 MB/s, and 102.17 GB/s, with a latency of 66.1 ns; whereas when using DDR5 6000 memory, the memory read, write, and copy bandwidth of the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK motherboard test platform are only 94805 MB/s, 83296 MB/s, and 85663 MB/s, with a memory access latency of 68.7 ns.
The "Master Lu" memory performance test can illustrate the difference in memory performance of the motherboard when paired with DDR5 8000 memory and DDR5 6000 memory through a simple score. When paired with DDR5 6000 memory, the "Master Lu" memory performance test score is only 335,324 points, but after switching to DDR5 8000 memory, the "Master Lu" memory performance test score significantly increases to 418,337 points, with an improvement in memory performance of up to 24.8%. This also fully demonstrates that the ability of the motherboard to support high-speed memory is very important.Can bring better processor performance
It can be seen that better memory performance also brings higher processor performance. Although the test platform uses the same Core i9-14900K processor and the same Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard, whether it is the single-thread or multi-thread performance of the processor, whether it is executing rendering applications, or executing video transcoding, file compression and decompression, the performance of the test platform after matching with DDR5 8000 memory is better. For example, after using DDR5 8000 memory, the single-core and multi-core performance of the Core i9-14900K in Geekbench 6.2.2 increased by 0.7% and 5.1% respectively compared to using DDR5 6000. Its HandBrake 4K H.264 video transcoding 1080p H.265 video reduced the time by 4 seconds, and the 7-Zip processor compression and decompression performance increased by 4.6% compared to using DDR5 6000.
Under all default settings, after matching with DDR5 8000 memory, the motherboard can make the CINEBENCH R23 processor multi-core rendering performance of 14900K break through 42000 points.
In the CINEBENCH R23 rendering test, because the Core i9-14900K on the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard can run the P Core performance core at a full core working frequency of 5.7GHz, which is 100MHz higher than its default full core frequency of 5.6GHz, therefore, after matching with DDR5 8000 memory, its multi-core rendering performance can break through 42000 points, which is not only 1000 points higher than the score when matched with DDR5 6000 on the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark, but also about 2.6% higher than the score of the Core i9-14900K on other Z790 motherboards.
It can automatically overclock to a full core of 5.8GHz
In the motherboard BIOS, by adjusting the working mode from Default to Performance, the motherboard will increase the full core frequency of the 14900K P Core to 5.8GHz.
In order to obtain better results, we also manually overclocked the E Core energy efficiency core frequency of the Core i9-14900K to 4.5GHz in the test.
During overclocking, players do not need to manually adjust the voltage. By using the Adaptive (adaptive) mode in the BIOS, the motherboard will automatically add pressure to the processor.
It is worth mentioning that in the test, we found that if the working mode is adjusted from Default (default) to Performance (performance) in the ALTER version of the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard's graphical BIOS, then the motherboard will further increase the full core working frequency of the processor's P Core performance core to 5.8GHz. In the test, in order to obtain better performance, we also manually adjusted the full core working frequency of the E Core energy efficiency core from 4.4GHz to 4.5GHz. As for the processor voltage adjustment problem that players are troubled with during overclocking, the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard can intelligently solve it. Just set the processor voltage to Adaptive (adaptive) mode, and the motherboard will automatically add pressure according to the working frequency of the processor, ensuring that the processor can enter the operating system and complete the performance test, and users do not need to manually adjust the voltage.
Under the combination of 5.8GHz P Core + 4.5GHz E Core, the motherboard can increase the CINEBENCH R23 processor multi-core rendering performance to 42497 points.With the combination of 5.8GHz P Core and 4.5GHz E Core, the motherboard can boost the processor performance of the Core i9-14900K in "Master Lu" to a score of 1,458,419 points.
In the PerformanceTest 11.0 and CPU-Z processor performance tests, there is also a slight improvement in the processor's multi-threading performance.
Under the combination of 5.8GHz P Core and 4.5GHz E Core, the Colorful CVN Z790 ARK Ark motherboard can enhance the CINEBENCH R23 processor multi-core rendering performance to 42,497 points, with "Master Lu" processor performance reaching as high as 1,458,419 points, a 5.4% increase from the default setting of 1,383,149, ranking first in the "Master Lu" processor performance score library. At the same time, its PerformanceTest 11.0 processor performance has also increased from 64,689 points to 66,303 points, and the CPU-Z processor multi-threading performance has risen to 17,891.9 points. However, due to the P Core performance core frequency of the processor being fixed at 5.8GHz, which is lower than its default single-core maximum boost frequency of 6.0GHz, there is a slight decrease in single-core performance after full-core overclocking.
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