NZXT N7 Z790 Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

As is the case with pretty much all NZXT hardware these days, it’s available in a choice of black or white. In fact, so few motherboards are really that white or that black these days, with mirrors, chrome, silver, and ARGB dotted over them, motherboards are busy looking things now, but NZXT has kept things very minimal and muted, and I love that, as it looks incredibly clean and tidy.

The VRM heatsinks are nicely designed and should deliver plenty of cooling performance, or at least, I hope so, but we’ll test that shortly.

Under the heatsinks, you can see there’s a densely packed 16+1+2 DrMOS Power Phase Design with 12K black capacitors used throughout the motherboard too. The CPU takes power from an 8-pin PSU header, but there’s an optional additional 4-pin for added voltage stability for more powerful CPUs and overclocking.

The armour covers most of the board, but as you can see, some parts are left open, such as the DDR5 slots, which support 6000 MHz and Intel XMP 3.0.

The armour even surrounds all of the PCIe slots, but the armour is actually three separate panels here and each can be removed as required; which is especially handy for reaching the M.2 mounts. There’s a PCIe 5.0 slot at the top, fully armoured. Below that, there are 2 PCIe 4.0 x16 slots in x4 mode and 2 PCIe 3.0 x1 slots.

With all the armour and heatsinks removed, you can see there are three M.2 mounts tucked under it all. All three are PCIe 4.0, two support up to a 2280 and one supports up to a 22110 drive. There’s also an M.2 2230 with a WiFi BT PCIe module installed in it, which is wired to the rear I/O.

Tucked into the bottom of the motherboard, are some handy power controls; great for me, as I test on an open-air test bench.

The rear I/O is well equipped with eight USB ports, which include a Type-C 20 Gbps port. Plus, there’s HDMI and Optical out, as well as five audio jacks. As is pretty much standard now, there is both 2.5 GbE LAN and WiFi 6E.