EVGA X570 Dark Review

Conclusion

We know that today’s review has been somewhat of a change to our regularly styled reviews, particularly in terms of comparing the X570 motherboards against one another. However, we learnt our lesson from the Crosshair VIII Extreme that our Ryzen 9 3950X is already at its peak of capacity and given the choice between showing this EVGA X570 Dark, a premium flagship motherboard, off on an old CPU or just sticking to the new Ryzen 5000 series the choice was obvious. After all, nobody is going to look at a motherboard at this end of the price spectrum and engineered to within an inch of its life only to then stick their old 2nd Gen Ryzen CPU in it. This is a top-of-the-range motherboard designed squarely for those who want to extract every last megahertz from their new flagship Ryzen CPU.

Let’s get the performance out of the way straight away. This is the peak of the EVGA X570 range and so it made perfect sense to put it against the peak of the ASUS Republic of Gamers range and as we saw there is nothing to choose between them. Whichever you pick you’ll be able to maximise your CPU, and only those of you with truly golden, silicon lottery winning processors will come close to testing the ability of the EVGA Dark.

If the performance is similar then what makes the EVGA stand out from the crowd?

Unquestionably the thing we love most about it is the attention to detail and the design enhancements that EVGA have made. Moving the DIMM slots to the top of the motherboard frees up the right hand edge for the power cables, undoubtedly the most robust cables you route from your PSU and the ones that are hardest to hide away. EVGA putting them together on the right side, and mounting them horizontally, makes building the Dark an absolute breeze. Additionally, now the top left of the motherboard isn’t designed with enough room to be able to plug your two 8pin 12V cables in, the heatsink is able to be extended into the jaw-dropping number that has been peeking at you from the photos at the top of every page here. The results we saw in our VRM testing, whilst pushing the best Ryzen 9 CPU available to incredible heights, show how successful this design has been. The EVGA X570 Dark is a cool motherboard, which will only bring benefits across your whole system as there isn’t a load of heat being dumped into your case from the power phases.

That attention to detail in both build quality and considering the user experience extends across the whole PCB. Fan headers are everywhere and horizontal. RGB LED strip headers are all clustered together. It’s very easy to get to the M.2 slots and they are well protected. It’s a builders dream, particularly if you’re slightly anal about the neatness of your cabling. It makes the EVGA X570 Dark a joy to build and use, and that’s something that we appreciate and often gets overlooked by designers.

All in all the EVGA X570 Dark is a beast of a motherboard with performance to spare, a gorgeous design and incredible build quality. It sits at the very peak of the X570 options on the market and wins our OC3D Enthusiast Award.

  

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