The EVGA X570 Dark Motherboard Review: A Dark Beast For Ryzen

Board Features

The EVGA X570 Dark is an E-ATX motherboard designed for enthusiasts and extreme overclockers to maximize the performance of AMD's Ryzen 5000 series of processors. While the X570 Dark has many features associated with other premium X570S models recently launched, much of its feature set is geared towards extreme overclocking, including a transposed socket with two memory slots capable of supporting up to 64 GB of DDR4-4800 memory only.

EVGA includes three PCIe 4.0 slots, including two full-length slots operating at x16 and x8/x8, with a third half-length slot operating at x4. The EVGA X570 Dark also has plenty of storage options including two PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, and a combined total of eight SATA ports. Six of the SATA ports support RAID 0, 1, and 10 arrays which are driven by the chipset, and the other two are via a separate ASMedia ASM1061 SATA controller.

In the overclocking feature set is a voltage Probelt connector with cables supplied in the box, as well as an overclocker's toolkit consisting of PCIe dip switches, a Safeboot button, Clear CMOS button, and power button. For cooling, EVGA provides eight 4-pin headers with two designated to CPU fans, two for water pumps, and four for chassis fans.

In terms of connectivity, EVGA includes one USB 3.2 G2 Type-C, four USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, and two USB 3.2 G1 Type-A on the rear panel. Other options in regards to USB include one USB 3.2 G2 Type-C header, two USB 3.2 G1 Type-A headers (four ports), and one USB 2.0 header (two ports). Other connectivity includes five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical output which are powered by a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec and EVGA NU SV3H615 headphone amplifier pairing, while the board also includes a PS/2 combo port and a secondary clear CMOS button.

Focusing on networking support, EVGA includes two Intel I225-V 2.5 GbE controllers with two available ports on the rear panel. For wireless connectivity, EVGA is using an Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 wireless interface which also includes support for BT 5.2 devices.

Test Bed

As per our testing policy, we take a high-end CPU suitable for the motherboard released during the socket’s initial launch and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the processor maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance. While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS. Most users will fall back on JEDEC supported speeds - this includes home users and industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.

Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives, in essence, an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, overriding memory sub-timings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.

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