Asrock Z590 PG Velocita
Challenging the sub $500 market.
Say hello to the Asrock PG Velocita! It’s a new product family and an evolution of the Phantom Gaming brand. It sits in between Asrock’s mainstream ranges and the high end Taichi. Much like the MSI and Asus boards, it aims to find a balance of premium features without the top end bells and whistles that separate the sub $500 boards from those with ever steeper price jumps. It’s a board we were excited to check out.
The Velocita features a busy looking grey, black and red theme complete with a little PCB inside the chipset heatsink. It’s a really bold design with its splashes of RGB and attention-grabbing graphics. Will it appeal to all? Maybe, maybe not, but to us it looks good. It features the usual 3x M.2 slots and six SATA ports.
We’re spending a lot of time examining the VRM designs of all the tested boards as it is central to the performance of 11th Gen CPUs, particularly the 11900K with Adaptive Boost enabled. The Velocita includes a 16-phase VRM with 60a chokes. This is more than enough current to drive an AVX loaded 11900K. The heatsinks are on the chunky side but we feel that Asrock could do a little better job with them, both in terms of surface area and their aesthetic. Under a full AB load, the VRM returned a temperature of 69 degrees, which is a good result. Although it’s one of the warmer boards, it is well within spec.
The rear I/O is a strength and an area Asrock usually equips well. About the only thing missing is a USB Gen 2x2 port though there is a header for one. Two Gen 2 ports are joined by six Gen 1 ports and two 2.0 ports. Networking duties are handled by Killer controllers, the only board in the roundup to come with them. Note that big blue Intel now owns Rivet networks, so these can be can be considered Intel controllers. Killer E3100G 2.5G and Intel I219V controllers are joined by a Killer AX1675X Wi-Fi 6E controller. It’s the only board in the roundup to include dual LAN.
The Velocita performed as expected across our benchmark suite, and proved to be quite strong under lightly threaded and gaming loads. We believe Asrock tends to be aggressive with its secondary and tertiary memory as the bandwidth sensitive 7zip benchmark shows the Asrock performing particularly well. We saw a lot of variation in the PCIe 4.0 SSD test, where the Asrock clearly has a bit of BIOS tweaking to do to catch up, though in real world ‘feel’ this won’t be noticeable.
The Velocita is very competitive in its price range, Throw in dual LAN and a couple of nice additions such as a GPU retention bracket and USB PCIe bracket too. We like its design and connectivity features. Asrock usually finds a way to add superior features and specifications without charging exorbitant prices. We do feel the Velocita is a BIOS or two away from reaching a state of maturity. That’s just a matter of a little tuning. If you’ve got $500 to spend the Asrock Z590 PG Velocita is a lot of board for the price.