Colorful is a Chinese manufacturer that’s known for its GPUs — I used its variant of the GeForce RTX 4080 for just over a year now — and the brand is venturing into other areas, including memory, motherboards, and storage. Its latest products in the Z790 motherboard series are the iGame Z790D5 Ultra and Flow, and while the latter looks interesting in its own right, I’m interested in the Ultra model.
For one thing, the Z790D5 Ultra features an iridescent pattern that looks great; it serves as a nice contrast to the white color scheme that you get with the rest of the board. Colorful touts gold-plated contacts on the PCIe and RAM slots, with the latter getting an alloy-reinforced design as well. The board can accommodate up to 192GB of DDR5 RAM going up to 8200MT/s, and there are six SATA ports.
You also get 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, Wi-Fi 6E, RGB lighting that’s customizable via Colorful’s software, and a debug LCD. The Ultra model has four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports with 5Gbps connectivity, three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports with 10Gbps connectivity, and a solitary USB-C port that can be used to charge other devices over the USB PD 3.0 standard at 30W.
Overall, it looks like an intriguing board, but we’ll have to wait and see what it will cost once it hits shelves at the end of 2023. There’s clearly no shortage of Z790 motherboards at the moment, and I’m testing a few from ASUS and other brands. Colorful has a decent presence in Asian markets, but with its motherboard unit still an unknown, it will need to be aggressive to challenge the more established brands.
