After unveiling a new line of Case, a revamped range of fans and power supplies, NZXT is moving forward in bringing proprietary products to market to build a 360-degree PC. The American brand is known on the market as specializing in the creation of custom builds, drawing on a catalog of first choice components at a competitive price, all accompanied by fast delivery times and clean and elegant assembly.
The success received has led the company to expand and make itself known also in the European market, offering preassembled products with a really attractive quality-price ratio, especially in the most serious period of the semiconductor crisis, in which we have witnessed an increase in prices skyrocketing. , graphics cards in the first place.
The ambition therefore leads NZXT to create proprietary components without necessarily having to rely on other brands and act as a reseller and during this year we are witnessing a progressive but pressing pace of debut of products ready to compete with the direct ones. opponents.
At this pace, we expect many more surprises over the course of the year, but as of today it is enough to know that the line of motherboards also has two new arrivals, designed to equip 12th generation Intel CPUs. Hence the N7 and N5 Z690 arrive on the market, the motherboards that do not fear the comparison with the most requested motherboards on the market of companies of the caliber of ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte.
Specifically, today we will talk about the big sister, the most powerful and top of the range of the line, the N7 Z690, of which you can find the technical specifications here. The board is designed and built in collaboration with ASRock, exactly like the previous generation Z590 and also incorporates its aesthetics, already appreciated at the time with a metal cover to protect the most sensitive parts, in white or black colors.
Once connected the graphics card, processor and all the components, from our case with side tempered glass the black NZXT motherboard does not look bad and indeed makes everything more harmonious and elegant, an aspect to be taken into consideration for users who bet on a build. graceful. For those who are devoted to RGB lighting anytime, anywhere, just know that the N7 Z690 has two headers for NZXT RGB, a header for 3-pin 5V ARGB and another header for 4-pin 12V RGB. This means that you can combine various types of components even from different manufacturers and manage everything through NZXT Cam, after consulting clearly compatible models.
But what about, in addition to being beautiful to look at, each component must also be performing especially after having faced a tax expense of € 299, current price at launch and recommended by the manufacturer. So let’s see how the new Z690 behaves on the test bench.
The first observation to make is that this new motherboard does not support RAM other than DDR4, a somewhat unusual choice given the now widespread use of DDR5 in the creation of latest generation PCs. This could be the first important stake, so much so as to remove this card from the wish list of those who are about to buy a PC by implementing the best technologies on the market.
To this is added a single HDMI port present on the N7 Z690, and together with the aforementioned limitation to the DRR4, they determine absences that in reality are not so incisive but rather easily bearable for a PC that aims at very high performance. However, it remains a strange combination, which finds no clear explanation other than to pursue a different choice than the other producers.
For the rest, the board equips two SMA antenna connectors (2T2R), 2x USB 2.0, 3 USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, 1x USB-C 3.2×2 Gen 2 port, 2 USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports and 1x audio jack S / PDIF5x, a Wi-Fi 6E network card, Bluetooth 5.2 and Realtek ALC1220 audio. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, being designed for even 12th generation CPUs, the onboard socket is an LGA1700 ideal for Alder Lake processors, supported by a 12 + 1 DrMOS Power Phase Design power supply.
The substantial differences with the previous model, in addition to a decrease in USB ports is the inclusion of an M.2 heatsink for the main slot, essential for those who use a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.
In our test we integrated the motherboard to a medium-high performance build with an i7 12000k processor, Nvidia 3070 GPU, 2 Team T-FORCE Delta RGB DDR4 16GB at 3200MH, NZXT Kraken X63 heatsink and NZXT Gold 850 power supply. framed inside NZXT’s H7 Flow again. The N7 Z650 board therefore replaces an ASRock Z690 Extreme in our configuration, a direct opponent in the quality / price ratio in which the newcomer is positioned. In fact, the Z690 series is one of the most competitive on the market with minimal differences between them in a reduced price range, obviously if you do not consider the top hardware that can reach and exceed € 600.
First of all, in our case, there weren’t many surprises inside the BIOS, coming precisely from an ASRock, the same manufacturer as NZXT for motherboards. The navigation inside is the same and we perceived an intense feeling of familiarity by navigating between the tabs for the Boot, Overclocking and in the Tools. The UEFI interface therefore remains simple and intuitive, and even the less experienced will be able to get by inside the internal meanders of the motherboard.
Once everything started up, with a version of Windows 10 Pro, the performance under strain with high-performance games and a considerable demand for computational power appeared absolutely in line with our expectations. The temperature reached by the CPU did not exceed 60 degrees even with intensive use for several hours, remaining consistent with the statistics provided by the manufacturer. We would like to clarify that this value is also obtained thanks to the use of a liquid heatsink that keeps the temperatures constant, without which they could increase by up to ten degrees in certain circumstances.
The only flaw that emerges is in the field of framerate, certainly lower due to the DRR4 that we had to equip at the expense of the more performing DRR5. If it is usual to use the latter, the difference when playing games of the range of Elden Ring and Call of Duty: Vanguard for example, are visible without having to resort to counting frames with the calculation tools offered by NVIDIA. We are not talking about abysmal differences, in reality the gap is really minimal, measurable in a handful of frames, a small gap that will certainly be taken into consideration by users who are not inclined to compromise in this area. In the opposite case, users looking for an average configuration may prefer this small loss of performance, undoubtedly gaining in terms of the expense of building a PC of their liking.
The competition in this price range with the same performance is very high so that there is not a landslide victory by one manufacturer over the other and the choices fall on motherboards that are more suited to their needs, whether they are for the DRR5 or the number of doors present. Also not to be forgotten is the aesthetics, capable of not disfiguring any internal configuration you choose thanks to the easily removable metal cover to make the necessary changes during the assembly phase.
The market is currently very saturated with motherboards, produced and designed for every need and wallet capacity, and NZXT does nothing but add an excellent motherboard for medium-high configurations to absolutely keep an eye on if you are willing to go down to some small compromise.
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