Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

As we all know, overclocking is often the exclusive preserve of geeks. Ordinary players tend to be more likely to use it silently, and opening a XMP in memory is already a high-end operation. But gigabyte's high-end motherboard Z790 snow sculpture has achieved a big breakthrough: it makes CPU overclocking and memory optimization into an one-button fool, so that ordinary players can enjoy the extra performance. At the same time, the strong motherboard materials also leave enough room for overclocking.

In this article, we will use the current flagship i9-13900K to test the performance of the gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture and the BIOS experience. The following is the test configuration:

Hardware design as a high-end Z790 motherboard, Z790 snow sculpture spares no effort in design, specifications and materials. This is a standard E-ATX motherboard, the size is very large, you should pay attention to chassis compatibility when purchasing.

From the front, it uses a large number of oblique cut lines on the heat dissipation armor and uses a more textured silver-gray color, which makes it a perfect match with a pure white chassis, so it's no wonder it's named snow sculpture.

As the CPU interface part of the core interface, the gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture uses intel's latest LGA1700 interface, which means that it supports all 12th and 13th generation core processors. Of course, the optical interface support is not enough, and the power supply part also needs power to power the i7 and i9 processors. In terms of core power supply, the gigabyte Z790 AORUS ELITE AX-W motherboard uses 16-phase power supply design, in which 16-phase power supply for CPU core, 1-phase power supply for VCCGT nuclear display, 2-phase power supply for VCCInAUX. The 16-phase core power supply is composed of DrMos + fully enclosed inductor + solid-state capacitor, which provides a sufficient and stable current supply for the performance release of the i9 processor.

In the aspect of CPU power supply, two 8Pin designs are adopted. For overclocking players, it can provide a more stable power supply. If it is for daily use, only one by one.

In order to meet the huge power consumption requirements of the 13th generation flagship processors, the gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture uses a complete set of silver and white heat dissipation armor to cover most of the core heating areas, with gully energy in the middle and improved heat transfer efficiency.

The heat sink on the south bridge also has a cool RGB lighting effect, which can be synchronized with other lights through the software.

The gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture motherboard provides 4 memory slots and is the latest DDR5 memory slot. A major feature of the 700 series chipset is the upgrade of the memory controller to support higher DDR5 memory frequencies. In addition, the daisy chain serial wiring which is different from the traditional parallel wiring design is specially designed in the circuit, which effectively eliminates the Stub effect, reduces the signal interference in the motherboard, and is easier to raise the memory frequency, up to 7600MHz +.

In terms of storage, gigabyte snow sculpture motherboard Z790 AORUS ELITE AX-W motherboard supports M.2 hard drive of PCIe 4.0mm 4, which can be directly connected to CPU to achieve ultra-fast transmission speed. Gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture is also equipped with a towering heat dissipation armor at the top to provide the strongest heat dissipation for the fastest hard drive.

In addition, there is a huge heat sink under it, and there are three M.2 interfaces under it, all of which support PCIe4.0*4 rate to meet the needs of mass storage.

The gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture has three PCIe slots, of which the first PCIe slot supports PCIe 5.0'16, and the other two support PCIe 4.0'16 and PCIe 3.0'16. The topmost graphics card slot is also wrapped in alloy armor to prevent it from being bent because the graphics card is too heavy.

In terms of IO interfaces, the gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture provides a rich extension, with four USB2.0 Type-A ports (black) from left to right, followed by two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports (red), plus three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports. There is a USB-C port with 20Gbps rate in the middle. Video output provides a DP interface, and a HDMI interface, 2.5G network port and Wi-Fi6e wireless network card are not absent. Such a rich interface is enough to meet the massive file transfer of the studio.

Of course, you can't just have hardware stacking. The BIOS of the motherboard is the soul of the motherboard. Next, let's take a look at its BIOS experience.

BIOS experience gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture BIOS continues the classic orange and black color of the AORUS brand, and supports Chinese. After entering BIOS, what still comes into view is the system information in simple mode, including CPU fundamental frequency, memory frequency, temperature and so on. The memory frequency can be quickly adjusted through the XMP configuration. But it is worth noting that the upper right corner added a gigabyte high-end Z-series motherboard unique GIGABYTE PerfDrive option.

The first three modes are optimized for 360 water cooling. The first option, Optimization, is to ensure that all cores run at maximum Rui frequency. The second option, Instant 6GHz, automatically selects 1-2 cores to overclock to 6GHz. The third option, Spec Enhance, is to optimize energy efficiency. The fourth option, E-Core Disable, is more special. it is suitable for 240water cooling or high-end air cooling, and can turn off all small cores. Later in the running session, the author will test the performance, temperature and power consumption in different modes.

After pressing F2 to enter the advanced mode, the gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture provides many adjustment options, including memory and CPU overclocking. Gigabytes put the common functions of overclocking on the first page, which is very convenient to adjust.

As a Z-series motherboard that supports overclocking, BIOS naturally provides a wealth of voltage and frequency regulation options. Players who like overclocking can adjust it manually here.

However, the biggest advantage of gigabyte's new motherboard is the support for DDR5 memory, due to the upgrade to DDR5 memory. Therefore, it is particularly sensitive to frequency. In memory settings, you can easily adjust memory frequency doubling, Gear mode, timing and voltage. Ordinary users only need to open XMP to feel at ease to use it. The gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture also provides compatibility with AMD's EXPO memory files.

The default frequency of DDR5 is 4800MHz. In this state, the read, write and delay performance are not satisfactory.

After opening XMP-6000MHz, memory read and write has been greatly improved, and the latency has also decreased, which can already meet the use of the vast majority of players, but gigabyte is not satisfied with this.

Don't forget, the new generation of gigabyte motherboards generally support a cool techs: high memory bandwidth (High Bandwidth) low latency technology (Low Latency) when this switch is turned on in BIOS, the motherboard will automatically reduce memory latency and further improve memory performance, and it is better to open it together with XMP.

When low latency is enabled, the latency is further reduced from 71.5ns of XMP to 66.8ns, while reading and writing are also improved, which can be said to be an automatic overclocking on the basis of XMP.

But we still want to push the limit of memory in hand, so we further increase the frequency to 6400MHz, and we can still boot smoothly. It has to be said that the gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture's memory overclocking compatibility is really good, after overclocking, read and write and latency have further evolved, and the read speed has broken through the 100GB / s barrier, and the performance has improved significantly. Even players who don't know how to overclock in memory can get similar performance through gigabyte's memory low latency and high bandwidth technology. GO ELITE, that's awesome!

In addition to overclocking and regular information options, the gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture also supports Smart Fan 6 intelligent fan adjustment technology and fast Q-Flash BIOS updates, and the graphical interface + large icons are also easy to adjust.

Performance testing is followed by what the author is most concerned about-performance release. As we mentioned earlier, the gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture offers four performance modes to choose from. So let's try Optimization mode first. Measured in the 15-minute grill test, gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture did not appear overheating power outage or blue screen, CPU power consumption is always stable at about 276W, CPU temperature is stable at 88 ℃, which is a relatively good performance in the default mode.

In this mode we run points, the performance is also in line with the normal level of i9-13900K, the performance is good.

Then we test the Instant 6GHz mode, which selects 1 or 2 of the best cores to 6GHz to improve single core performance. Measured in this mode, the power consumption almost does not change, and the temperature is exactly the same as 88 ℃, because this mode mainly improves the single-core performance and has little effect on the whole-core performance.

However, the single-core performance is also solid, from the default 939 points to 966 points, the improvement is not small.

Then let's take a look at the Spec Enhance mode, which uses a step-down idea to optimize power consumption as much as possible. In this mode, the power consumption of i9-13900K is only about 253W and the temperature is 85 ℃. In theory, this power consumption can be suppressed even by some 240 water cooling.

Then we ran CPU-Z points, and it didn't seem to have degraded too much. With a little bit of performance in exchange for low power consumption, it is very cost-effective.

The last mode is E-Core Disable, which blocks all energy efficiency cores. Can let the performance core eat more resources, better overclocking. Can also let Windows10 users continue to rest assured to use, after all, the size of Windows10 core scheduling is not very good, gigabyte this function is still very intimate. Measured in this mode, the power consumption is only about 163W, which almost reaches the i5 level, and can be suppressed by air cooling with a single tower.

Running points is not very good-looking, basically an i5-13600K level. Therefore, I only recommend that Windows10 users turn on this feature when they encounter compatibility problems.

As you can see from the above tests, the strongest performance is the 6GHz mode. So we then test Cinebench R20 in this mode, with a single core score of 894 pts and a multi-core score of 15568 pts, with a very comprehensive performance release.

In Cinebench R23, the single core score is 2343 pts and the multi-core score is 40795 pts. The performance of Z790 snow sculpture is stable throughout the test process, so it can be said that the performance of i9-13900K has been fully released.

At the end of the game test, we run several 3A masterpieces that eat CPU performance to try the stability of this configuration in the actual use environment. First of all, the Wild Dart 2: redemption, which is a big fan of CPU, all our games are tested under 2K resolution + quality DLSS. The actual run BenchMark can run at about 120 frames, and the game experience is very stable and excellent.

In Tomb Raider: shadow, the number of frames also reached 206frames, and the results did not show CPU restrictions, but showed 99% GPU restrictions, indicating that the performance of CPU was completely overflowed, and the performance of i9-13900K was excellent.

In the game of "Cyberpunk 2077", which is extremely demanding in configuration. The average frame number of i9-13900K+RTX 4070 can also reach 103 frames, the game experience is very smooth, gigabyte Z790 snow carving motherboard is a good choice for gamers.

Summary

On the hardware level, the gigabyte Z790 snow sculpture can be said to do what a high-end motherboard can do. It is the ceiling level of the motherboard in terms of power supply, expansion, appearance design and ease of use. What impresses the author most is the choice of four performance modes in BIOS and the unique memory, high bandwidth and low latency cool techs. With these presets, even rookies who don't overclocking can get similar performance to overclocking players with one click. It can be said that this motherboard can play its due strength in the hands of any player.

At present, gigabyte Z790 snow sculptures are being sold on JD.com and other e-commerce platforms at a price of 2499 yuan, which is suitable for players who choose 13 generations of Core i7 and i9.

JD.com AORUS Z790 motherboard supports core i5 13600KF i7 13700KF 13900KF CPU Z790 An ELITE D5 [snow sculpture WiFi] brand-new 13-generation motherboard single 2499 yuan direct link

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