ASRock Z590 PG Velocita Motherboard Review

Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

Phantom Gaming is an entire lineup of motherboards built for gamers ground up. These solutions offer a blend between overclocking capability with advanced VRM designs and functionality through connectivity often geared towards gamers with a plethora of USB ports 2.0 through 3.2 Gen 2.

Z590 PG Velocita is one of the first boards to come through with the new Intel chipset without deploying Thunderbolt 4. ASRock looks to offset this with 10 USB ports, gigabit LAN and 2.5Gbe all on the rear I/O. Additionally, this is the first motherboard in the office to have the Killer AX1675 chipset, which includes Bluetooth 5.2 and that 2.5Gbe we mentioned above, features Killer E3100G with a direct PCIe link to the CPU for lower latency.

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Getting into the motherboard specifications, the PG Velocita, like all Z590 platforms, will support both 10th and 11th Generation processors and is built on a 14 phase power design, 12+2 Dr. Mos configuration.

Memory support is across four slots, with 2133MHz being the standard for 10th Gen processors and 3200MHz for 11th Gen. Overclocking is supported up to 4800MHz. Storage includes six SATA 6Gbps connections along with one Hyper M.2 and two Ultra M.2 slots. LAN breaks down to two RJ45 ports, one setup for Gigabit from the chipset and the second power by Killer E3100G. Killer AX1675 handles WiFi. The ever-popular Realtek ALC1220 chipset powers audio this includes 7.1 output alongside optical.

Pricing

The ASRock Z590 PG Velocita carries an MSRP of $289.99 with a three-year warranty.

Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

Packaging and Accessories

Retail packaging for the PG Velocita follows the colorway and box art found with the X570 board just a few months back. Along the bottom, we have chipset and CPU compatibility.

The back of the box goes into heavy detail onboard features and layout.

Included with the motherboard, we have installation guides, manuals, and driver disc up top, while below you will find SATA cables, antennas, and the graphics cardholder.

ASRock Z590 PG Velocita Overview

PG Velocita offers a dark theme, silver and black colorway with accents of red; this is nearly identical to other chipset platforms within the "PG" lineup. Heatsinks cover most of the essential components, including VRM, Chipset, and m.2 slots. RGB comes from the chipset and rear I/O cover. The rear of the board houses no armor plate but does have a few chips, including the Nuvoton Super I/O and VRM doublers around the CPU socket.

Rear I/O is relatively packed left to right. To the far left, we have HDMI and DP connections followed by two USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.2 Gen 1, and two USB 3.2 Gen 2, including a type-C. Antenna connections are to the right, before the audio panel that finishes this off.

The bottom of the motherboard includes front panel audio, Thunderbolt headers, and RGB connections. Further down, you get into USB 2.0 internal headers and fan connections, debug LED and chassis connections, finishing it off.

Up the motherboard's right side, you will find a standard layout that includes six SATA ports, Internal headers for Gen 1 and 2 USB 3.2.

Further up the same side, you will find the 24pin power connection and power/reset buttons.

Across the top, we start with RGB connections alongside fans.

And end with twin eight-pin power connections.

PCB and Circuit Analysis

VRM is controlled by the Intersil ISL69269 PWM controller centered between the two banks. This is paired with twelve SIC654 50A power stages for VCore and two SIC654A 50A stages for SoC.

Chipset is the main component above; to the right, we have ASMedia controllers for the internal USB headers.

Realtek ALC1220 can be found between the two banks of filter capacitors.

On the back of the board, you will find the E3100G 2.5Gbe controller.

UEFI, Software and Test System

UEFI

The Z590 PG keeps with it the same EFI setup we have seen on past platforms like the Extreme WiFi6e and upcoming Taichi review. The EZ Mode menu gives an overview of the board with a few customizable options such as XMP mode, RAID, and fan settings.

Once you switch to Advanced mode, we get a more traditional BIOS setup with a favorites section on the main page alongside hardware information. Moving into OC Tweaker, you will find plenty of options for tuning your CPU and memory settings, including user profiles. The tool menu includes access to polychrome sync so you can change RGB settings without software. Easy RAID and SSD Secure erase to configure storage arrays and options and move to the next tab; you have a hardware monitor that includes fan tuning.

Motherboard Testing Supporters

Sabrent supports our Intel motherboard testing with the fantastic Rocket4 Plus!

TeamGroup supports our Intel motherboard testing with their Team Xtreem DDR4 Memory!

TweakTown Intel Motherboard Test System

• CPU: Intel Core i9 11900K
• GPU: ASUS TUF RTX 3080 10GB
• RAM: Team Xtreem 2x8G DDR4 4500 (buy from Amazon)
• Cooler: MSI CoreLiquid K360
• OS Storage: Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 1TB (buy from Amazon)
• Power Supply: Corsair RM750X (buy from Amazon)
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)

Cinebench, Realbench and AIDA64

Cinebench R23

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that has been heavily relied upon by both Intel and AMD to showcase their newest platforms during unveils. The benchmark has two tests, a single-core workload that will utilize one thread or 1T. There is also a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU

Getting into our testing, the PG Velocita was in line with the last few tested boards. 1604 single thread and 15299 multi-thread.

Realbench

Realbench uses both video and photo workloads to benchmark your CPU. We use all three workloads in this scenario.

Realbench had the PG about a second quicker in image editing at 24.8, while encoding came in at 27 seconds.

AIDA64 Memory

AIDA64 has stayed as our means of testing memory bandwidth.

Read bandwidth topped 55K with 39K in write and 43K in copy.

Memory Latency came in at 63.9ns.

AES showed performance on par with the other tested boards, 171838.

SHA3 brings in 5563.

PCMark10 and PugetSystems Benchmarks

PCMark 10

PCMark is a benchmark from UL and tests various workload types to represent typical workloads for a PC. Everything from video conferencing, image import, and editing, along with 3D rendering, are tested.

Overall, scoring for the PG offered 8254; this was slightly higher than the Extreme.

Application testing within PCMark10 gives us 13291.

PugetBench

PugetBench comes from the fantastic people over at Puget Systems that have done countless hours and years benchmarking hardware. For our testing, we will utilize their Davinci Resolve, Photoshop, and Lightroom benchmarks, you can look into them more here.

PG Velocita scored 901 points in the Puget Photoshop bench.

In Lightroom, PG earns 864 points.

Last, we have Davinci Resolve. In this scenario, PG scores 1113 points.

Gaming Benchmarks

Gaming Benchmarks

FCND shows avg framerate of 147 for the PG Velocita.

Gears 5 offered 149 FPS on average.

Flight Simulator is a bit more challenging to set up, but I have been able to get some relatively good consistency by running the exact flight path and settings with AI.

For this benchmark, we run 1080p High-End and Brisbane to Archerfield Runway 22L. In this scenario, PG Velocita managed 63.12 FPS.

System I/O Benchmarks

Storage with CrystalDiskMark

Storage tests are all handled by our Sabrent Rocket4 Plus NVMe 4.0 SSD. Secondary storage tests are conducted with our WD_Black P50 SSD.

The sequential performance touched 7029 MB/s reads, and 5390 MB/s write.

In 4KQ1, we see 70 Mb/s read and 262 MB/s write.

External testing gave us solid results top to bottom. Gen 1 showed 465 MB/s while Gen 2 offered 1064 MB/s. Using the internal header, we tested Gen2x2 at 2005.21 MB/s with our WD P50.

Audio - Dynamic Range

Testing audio, we setup RMAA with a 3.5mm cable from the line-in to speaker out (green to blue) and set both to 24Bit 192KHz. In this test, PG Velocita proved 92.8 dBA.

Networking

With networking, we have 2368Mbps wired and 1278Mbps wireless.

Power, Thermals and Final Thoughts

Power Consumption

Wrapping up testing, power consumption reached 109w idle and 489 watts under CPU load.

Thermals

Idle temps ran around 24c with the PG Velocita, with peak temps reaching 74c during testing.

Overclocking

Intel has pushed 11900K to get the highest possible clocks out of it without overclocking. That said, we were able to get 5.2 All Core with the Z590 PG Velocita at 1.35v. This boosts single-core performance by ~65 points and threaded performance by ~600 points in R23.

Final Thoughts

PG Velocita delivers a solid motherboard platform with excellent features that are "gamer" focused; among these technologies is the Killer Suite with both Wi-Fi and LAN, and unique Direct Source LAN features that push PCIe lanes straight to the Killer E3100G. To enable this, ASRock has pulled integrated Thunderbolt 4 from this platform but does support it through the typical motherboard header and expansion card.

BIOS was well laid out and offered all the features one would expect from a high-level platform. This includes the ability to quickly manage any storage solution with Secure Erase and RAID platforms along with proper fan tuning, overclocking, and the ability to configure RGB settings without any software in Windows. The standard Windows software, A-tuning, was unavailable during our testing, but we expect to see it in upcoming motherboard reviews as we have the Taichi in the queue.

I didn't see any noticeable areas where the PG Velocita underperformed against previously tested platforms, but there have been two BIOS updates running up to the launch of 11th Generation CPUs, so I suspect there was performance left on the table. That said, we will retest and update our charts after the onslaught of Z590 wains.

What We Like

Socket Compatibility: Z590 offers 10th Gen users an upgrade path that doesn't break the bank.

PCIe 4.0: For 11th Gen CPUs, we finally get PCIe 4.0 support!

Price:$289 MSRP makes this board one of the most cost-effective full featured platforms.

What Could Be Better

Integrated Thunderbolt: Requires Add-In for Thunderbolt.