NZXT N7 Z790 White
Up Close
Just like the B650E and the previous N7 motheboards the box is plain and unadorned beyond a clear product image and the model name. I did allow us to learn that the French for a motherboard is literally board mother (Carte Mère). Cool.
When companies tell us that they’re releasing a white motherboard and then turn up with one that has a few glimpses of silver on an otherwise all black look, they need to take a shuftie at the way NZXT design their N7 boards. We think even the most pedantic person would struggle to describe this as anything other than a white motherboard, particularly with the full cover design.
There is a uniformity to the N7 range that we admire. It is so easy to change things for the sake of change, but NZXT know how they wanted it to look and, once they had perfected that design, stuck with it. It must save a fortune in tooling too, which partly explains the very attractive pricing of their N7 range.
It has been many years since the first full cover motherboards and time hasn’t diminished their attractiveness. It is just so much more pleasant to look at than a selection of empty M.2 sockets and a few chips. You still have easy access to the connections you need, but once you’ve built it it looks excellent.
When you’ve seen as many motherboards as we have, and built as many test rigs as we have, then little things can drive you crazy. One such thing is the insistence of a lot of motherboard designers that you use needle-nose pliers to fit the 12V ATX CPU power connectors or live with endlessly scarred fingertips. So NZXT putting the 8+4 connectors free from sharply edged heatsinks is a big tick in our book.
Above the northern-most heatsink is the CPU fan and AIO headers, as well as two parts of the NZXT lighting system that will be familiar to anyone who has used one of their Kraken AIOs.
