So clean. Very clean; that's what NZXT does best with its premium PC cases. It's a minimalist, mature alternative to the flashy, adolescent cases for gamers and enthusiasts. Of course, if you want to fully execute that minimalist concept, you need a motherboard to match. Usually, that is not easy to achieve. Motherboards are inherently busy and unorganized, cluttered with components, slots, and ports, and that's where NZXT's latest motherboard, the NZXT N7 Z490, comes in.

This is not the first motherboard to offer a fully covered design; other board manufacturers from Asrock to Asus offer various levels of board covering options. But true to NZXT's broad design philosophy, the N7 Z490 is perhaps the cleanest and least cluttered available today.

The board itself is finished in a glossy matte black, and the cladding is available in both white and black. As a physical object, it certainly looks a cut above the recommended retail price of $229. That's a fraction of the price of Asus' premium Maximus line of boards, which are not particularly expensive compared to the least expensive boards with the Z490 chipset (around $140-$150). In other words, you are not paying a huge premium for one of the best looking boards.

One might wonder how a relatively small player like NZXT can produce such a board at such a competitive price, given all the work that goes into a motherboard, such as maintaining support for the latest CPUs and keeping the BIOS sophisticated and up to date! The answer is simple. This board is actually made in partnership with Asrock.

In any case, at this competitive price point, it should come as no surprise that upon closer inspection, the cladding does not add any structural rigidity to the board, but rather is largely cosmetic. Similarly, the NZXT N7 Z490 is not the highest specification; its 8 plus 2 power stage is hardly a high-end motherboard, and it lacks the bells and whistles of a debug display.

On the other hand, it has almost everything you need for an all-around rig. First, there are two M.2 slots for high-speed storage. Additionally, it supports DDR4 up to 4,266 MHz and Intel's XMP 2.0 profile. Additionally, it has 8-channel audio, both Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1, and a full complement of antennas. Ethernet uses a Realtek 2.5Gb adapter. This is not state-of-the-art in this age of 10Gb boards. However, 2.5Gb is sufficient for most users, and again, at this price, expectations should be tempered.

Detailed additional features include integrated fan controllers and support for RGB accessories from all manufacturers as well as NZXT kits. Rounding out the major feature set is NZXT's Cam monitoring and control software and NZXT's BIOS interface. The former was criticized in previous implementations, perhaps due to limited resources, but has been significantly optimized and improved in recent iterations. NZXT's BIOS, on the other hand, is sleek, clean, and easy to navigate, as one would expect from a company that touts superior aesthetics.

But what about performance: we hooked up the NZXT N7 Z490 with Intel's LGA1200 top chip, the 10-core i9 10900K. Make no mistake, this is a tough test of a motherboard's power supply capabilities. As our own Dave James discovered earlier this year, the 10900K is an absolute power hog, consuming over 300 watts when overclocked. For this reason, the N7 Z490 has additional 8-pin and 4-pin auxiliary CPU power connectors.

The N7 Z490 outputs entirely reasonable figures at stock clocks. In some tests, notably the single-core Cinebench on the Z490 board we reviewed previously, they are down by a fraction of a percent. However, this is another example of a 10900K CPU, and the numbers are close enough to be within the range of variation obtainable from chip to chip with high-end CPUs.

The picture is a bit more complex when overclocked. The system starts at a maximum of 5.4 GHz, but under load, the board drops the all-core frequency to 5.1 GHz and occasionally down to 4.9 GHz. The same chip ran fine at 5.2 GHz on MSI's smaller MEG Z490i Unify.