Colorful Has Two New White Z790 Motherboards
Contrary to Colorful's name, these new motherboard have almost no hue at all.
Colorful has released two new motherboards with the Intel Z790 chipset for the LGA-1700 socket, covering 12th, 13th and 14th Gen Intel CPUs: the iGame Z790D5 Flow V20 and iGame Z790D5 Ultra V20.
While almost every motherboard vendor has a series of basic, gamer-centric and ultra-high-end options, there are often single-color options for a themed build. These new motherboards use white PCBs with black ports and connectors to provide a monotone look. The Flow V20 has chrome accents on the board's shroud and on the Ultra V20 there's an additional cover on the second PCIe slot and holographic effects over the VRM and chipset heatsink shroud.
iGame Z790D5 FLOW V20 Front PCB
iGame Z790D5 ULTRA V20 Front PCB
iGame Z790D5 FLOW V20 Rear I/O
iGame Z790D5 ULTRA V20 Rear I/O
The I/O panel does provide a one-click BIOS upgrade port and a switch. A clear CMOS is also provided next to it. Many of the motherboard trade-offs surround L/R and sub-audio ports for extra USB ports but Colorful chose otherwise.
Colorful says it intends to provide a balanced provision for gaming, multimedia and storage needs with both of these motherboards. Both of these Intel Z790-based, ATX size motherboards provide 18+1+1 phase with 4x PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, DDR5 support up to 7,000 MHz with OC, front and dual USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, with the front panel header supporting PD3.0 at 30W, a Realtek 2.5G Ethernet port with AX211/210 Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3.
The only differences between the two are that the Ultra V20 has two 12V 4-pin RGB pins with holographic effects over the VRM and the chipset and a shroud over the second PCIe x16 slot on the Flow V20.
Neither of the motherboards have the six M.2 slots you get on the the ASRock Phantom Gaming Z790 Nova WiFi mohterboard. To Colorful's credit, all of the M.2 ports are PCIe 4.0, while the ASRock provides PCIe 5.0 bandwidth to the first M.2 but reduces the first PCIe 5.0 x16 slot's bandwidth to x8 when used.
What's peculiar is that Colorful mentions it provides a "410" high-quality service and guaranteed after-sales service with no further explanation as to what that means. The press release does add it uses Dr MOS 90A power phases, 30μm gold-plated contacts on DIMM slots and PCIe slots, alloy-reinforced DDR5 slots, Tantalum capacitors and a debug LED (which is not mentioned in the specifications) on the motherboards, but those, oddly, are not mentioned in the specs or feature list on the website just yet.
Colorful doesn't mention alloy reinforcement on the first PCIe x16 slot, nor if these are merely wrapped around or anchored behind the motherboard. And there are no rear PCB images to help figure that out. Hopefully the company clarifies some of these details soon.
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Roshan Ashraf Shaikh has been in the Indian PC hardware community since the early 2000s and has been building PCs, contributing to many Indian tech forums, & blogs. He operated Hardware BBQ for 11 years and wrote news for eTeknix & TweakTown before joining Tom's Hardware team. Besides tech, he is interested in fighting games, movies, anime, and mechanical watches.