NZXT’s Plastic Shroud Is Trying To Have A Mass Effect On The Market
The N7 Z490 motherboard was not designed from scratch from NZXT, they haven’t started up a secret fab which will start cranking out motherboards, instead NZXT is responsible for the overall look of this motherboard. The benefits of picking up a motherboard designed by a cases and cooling company are aesthetic, if you stick with NZXT for your enclosure and cooling equipment you will end up with a very consistent look to your system. For the curious, as far as The FPS Review were able to determine the motherboard was built by ASRock.
The board offers a decent amount of features for a mid-ranged board, 8+2 power phases, 2.5GbE, WiFi 6, two M.2 and a decent selection of PCIe 16x and 1x slots, though the Realtek ALC1220 is not the best choice. As the board sells for around $230 that is a good mix of features, it won’t win you any benchmarking competitions but the shroud might just win you a system build competition.
The board itself doesn’t sport any RGBs of any kind, however it has a multitude of PWM headers, a 5v RGB header, a 12v RGB header, and two NZXT RGB headers so you will have plenty of flexibility to design your own light shows. Pop on over for a closer look at the components and the shroud.
First and foremost, NZXT doesn’t design or manufacture motherboards at all. Instead, motherboards are built by other companies and then branded by NZXT. This includes plastic cladding designed to make the motherboard more aesthetically pleasing.
