GIGABYTE Z790 UD AC, Ultra Durability Doesn’t Have To Be Ultra Expensive
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.
On the bench today is the GIGABYTE Z790 UD AC, one of GIGABYTE’s Ultra Durable line for the Intel Z790 chipset lineup. This is more of a budget-oriented motherboard, coming in at $180 on NewEgg at the time of writing. We will be loading this motherboard up with the i7 14700k that we recently reviewed, if you have the time you should also check out the i9 14900K and i5 14600k reviews we have as well.
