ASRock Is Releasing The Ultimate Z790 Motherboard For Sonic The Hedgehog Fans

PC and components maker ASRock has another custom paint job motherboard in the pipeline. Coinciding with today’s release of the Intel Core i9-13900K and other overclockable 13th Gen Core ‘Raptor Lake’ K processors, Intel Z790 chipset motherboards have naturally come to the fore. And, as per our headline, ASRock has a new Z790 motherboard ready for the fray, which will be particularly exciting for fans of Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog.

At the time of writing, the ASRock Z790 PG Sonic motherboard isn’t listed by the maker, so all we have to go on is a series of images from prolific PC tech Twitter leaker momomo_us. With it being a Z790 board, it should be launched and released very shortly to make the most of the initial wave of interest in Intel’s Raptor Lake platform.

The design speaks for itself, with great Sonic artwork on the packaging, and a well-integrated splash of Sonic design motifs used across the motherboard PCB, but what really stands out are the blue and white graphics across the motherboard’s heatsinks and rear I/O cover. It is good to see a Sonic gold ring, which appears to be recessed into the design, too.

Specs look decent for a modern full ATX-form factor motherboard for Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs (i.e. socket LGA1700). We can see it has four slots for up to 128GB of DDR5, offers two PCIe Gen5 slots (one reinforced for heavy GPU use), support for up to M.2 PCIe Gen5 x4 storage (five M.2 slots in total, plus eight SATA3 ports), features 20Gbps USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C ports (with 16 USB ports in total), as well as Killer 2.5GbE Ethernet, a RealTek ALC897 sound chip with 7.1 channel Nahimic Audio, HDMi and DP outputs, and ASRock’s Polychrome Sync aRGB lighting standard. Other attractions include the shielded 14+1+1 power phases, and special low latency USB ports for keyboard / mouse input.