EVGA X299 Dark Review

Introduction

The X299 chipset is Intel’s flagship offering, supporting all their high end features as well as their most powerful CPUs this side of some insane Enterprise offerings.

With so many cores and threads available the biggest problem has been taming the VRM temperatures and with the EVGA Dark we think they’ve come up with a nifty solution which should hopefully keep everything under control. Additionally if you’re wanting to overclock your system without banging it in and out of the case all the time it also is equipped with a bench table so that you can tune your setup to its fullest prior to building your rig.

With plenty of performance on tap from the X299 chipset, and the Dark being a new range topping model from EVGA, we had to take a break from all our recent reviews of the Ryzen 2nd Generation to see how well the X299 Dark performs.

Technical Specifications

The EVGA Dark has a few things that we think are unique to it. VRM temperatures have been a, ahem, hot button issue since the launch of the X299 chipset and EVGA have gone out of their way to ensure that your temperatures remain cool with high fin density and two fans ensuring that even the harshest environment wont over stress them. You can really stress your components too as the 12 layer PCB and thicker gold in the CPU socket combine with 100% solid state capacitors and external clock generators to give you the biggest selection of tools with which to extract the maximum overclock from your processor. You aren’t forced to swap back and forth between beefy overclocks and 24/7 ones either, as the Dark has three (count them) BIOS setups available to it. Finally instead of the Realtek audio the Dark has Creative’s Core3D audio installed.