Meanwhile ASUS Dark Hero has 16 phase 90 amp VRM.... again, I don’t understand the point of these boards. Intel sucks, who would buy a 6 year old 14nm chip?

RGB and Dark do not go together. Also the board is downright ugly. DARK meant no RGB to start with and it’s crept in like a snake. Marketing wins again!!! Intels announced i9-11900 CPU also looks to be another FAIL by team blue. We’ll see if they can get it together in the next few months but the rumors of Rocket Lake continue to fizzle like intel stock on AMD launch day. Looks like I’ll be buying my second ever AMD kit. The first was in the late 90’s and I got burned hopefully AMD is going to continue to be competitive but honestly their inability to make boards that support more than 1 Gen of cpu much like intel changing sockets like pants is starting to feel like more marketing control and less customer care.

I like the new Dark. I like the z490 Dark a little better. 11th gen doesn't excite me. If I had money to blow on latest gen then I'd probably spring for it, but knowing it the platform was already dead was the reason I didn't get 10th gen. Holding out for 12th gen or maybe even make a switch back to AMD. Its been years though. This z390 will just have to keep chugging along.

They look sick. Too bad it is very likely it will be out of stock, just as 99% on the page. It is now like some kind of fictional products. 

These new motherboards are no fun at all. 
Everything still 16 lames (I mean lanes) and hardly any slots for connectivity 
What kind of enthusiast uses Wi-Fi Really? 
We are building overly priced gaming consoles at this point. 
 
I have not seen anything affordable and worth buying in 5 years. 
Welcome to the future of building your own overpriced gaming console.
 
EDIT: Oh I forgot everything is USB now. my bad.

mr_scary
These new motherboards are no fun at all. 
Everything still 16 lames (I mean lanes) and hardly any slots for connectivity 
What kind of enthusiast uses Wi-Fi Really? 
We are building overly priced gaming consoles at this point. 
 
I have not seen anything affordable and worth buying in 5 years. 
Welcome to the future of building your own overpriced gaming console.
 
EDIT: Oh I forgot everything is USB now. my bad.

supposedly 20 lanes from the CPU which is decent for Vid card and 1 NVME. Might hold on to my x299 a little bit longer or until Intel decides to make a successor to the x299 platforms

Looks like only two RAM slots on the Dark? Is that normal?

Rocket lake was confirmed to be 20 PCIe lanes. So that's x4 lanes for these boards to utilize. Doubled-edged sword though, because it means even though Rocket Lake works in Z490 boards they won't get those extra x4 PCIe lanes. And to be clear, Intel already officially confirmed Alder Lake is launching at the end of this year. Z690 or whatever they call it will require DDR5 and won't be compatible with Rocket lake or older CPUs. 

So does this mean the Z490 Dark is not PCI 4.0 capable?
 
Or have they made any kind of official announcment regarding Rocket Lake compatibility? 
 
Thanks in advance for any info guys, been so busy at work lately, hard to keep up with all the nomenclature, chipsets, and features. 
 
No wonder I got such a good price on the KPE. If it's not 4.0 compatible I can live with that, most of the data I've seen says it's not a significant bottleneck unless you are running a bunch of NVME and multiple graphics cards. 
 
Sn8ke_iis

Sticking with the unsightly yellow capacitors I see....