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BIOSTAR Z790 VALKYRIE LGA1700 Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel LGA1700 by stefan @ 2022-12-25

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.

Packaging, A Closer Look Part I

Along with Intel’s 13rd generation of processors (Raptor Lake), a refined chipset version was also launched so now we do have the Z790 available with a lot of motherboards. There are a quite a bit of similarities with the Z690 such as support for DDR4 and DDR5 RAM, memory and CPU overclocking, a maximum of 128GB installable memory, and more! The main differences are the number of PCIe 4.0 lanes which are now 20 instead of 12, the number of PCIe 3.0 lanes which came down from 16 to just 8, while the official memory support went up from about 4800MHz in case of DDR5 memory to 5600MHz, which is great!

With the Z790, Intel Optane Memory support is now gone since Intel has decided to shut down their Optane and 3DXpoint storage division.

BIOSTAR does currently have two motherboards sporting the Z790 chipset, the mainstream Z790A-SILVER but also the high-end Z790 VALKYRIE. We will take a closer look at the VALKYRIE model, a series which we have checked out before in its Z690 format, but with DDR4 memory support. The motherboard is shipped inside a rather medium sized but quite heavy cardboard box, sporting the brand color scheme; right from the front, we will note small icons of supported technologies/processors:

On the back side, we will note the main product features, the technical specifications but also the I/O interfaces list, paired with a drawing:

By lifting the top cover, we will note that the mainboard is stored on the top layer, fully wrapped inside an anti-static bag:

Underneath, we will locate the board bundle:

Speaking of the physical bundle, we will note the User’s Manual, a F_PANEL adapter, four SATA cables but also a sticker set:

We get multiple stickers we can attach to our gaming system:

The supplied F_PANEL adapter does help with mounting the necessary cables easier:

Along with the manual, we will also receive a disk with the necessary drivers and utilities, but we always recommend using the latest versions from the website:

The manual does explain in-depth the installation procedure, along with the UEFI options we should set:

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