While the Z790 VALKYRIE motherboard from BIOSTAR gets sometimes lower scores in benchmarks versus the EVGA Z690 CLASSIFIED which has a more mature UEFI, it compensates by having better expansion options (3 full-sized PCIe slots, no less than five M.2 for storage, individually detachable heatsinks, but also quite a bit of headers). It incorporates a 20-phase design, shielded slots, a lot of headers for fans and USB ports but also a debug LED display for signaling errors.

In our tests, 6000MHz RAM was fully doable, even when working with a non-XMP kit and adjusting the necessary settings via UEFI interface. The RGB setup and fan curves can be configured from both UEFI and the Windows Aurora application, while the whole PCB assembly is protected from bending via the massive backplate in the back.

While testing the board, we noted a big performance difference in performance while running the X265 encoding workload, but this one requires HPET to be used in Windows OS and noted that some boards do not work well in this mode (felt an additional slowness in Windows animations as well). Reverting to non-HPET mode got everything back to normal in terms of performance.

The UEFI interface is easy to use, and we do have plenty of configuration options to adjust the system performance. While the last BIOS from the website was pumping too much voltage to the processor causing it to shutdown, we received right away an updated version which was built on 30.11.2022 and brought the VCore back to about 1.357V, while obtaining much safer temperatures in full load such as Cinebench rendering. Around the same time, we noted that the EVGA board we have tested it against was having a similar bug, which was also fixed with the 2.05 UEFI update.

The BIOSTAR Z790 VALKYRIE could be found online for about 487 Euros at the moment of the review.

BIOSTAR Z790 VALKYRIE LGA1700 Motherboard is Recommended for:

We would like to thank BIOSTAR for making this review possible!