Rugged And Cool
The first look at the GIGABYTE Z790 UD AC reveals some seriously robust construction, with a metal reinforced PCIe slot to hold today’s rather large GPUs. The VRMs and MOSFETs are equally protected, with a decent sized chunk of metal acting as a heatsink for them. The top NVMe slot also comes with a heatsink, the second and the M.2 slot intended for the WiFi card are on their own however. The power design is 16+1+1 hybrid phase, with the VRMs set up in a 8+8 phased parallel design.
The FPS Review tested it out with an i7-14700K and didn’t see a single issue when going through their suite of benchmarks. There are a decent spread of features for a $180 motherboard, making the GIGABYTE Z790 UD AC a tempting choice as the heart of a mid-range system. The power design should keep a Core i9 happy as well, if you chose to go with that beast.