Intel Z390 Motherboard Overview: 50+ Motherboards Analyzed
by Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on October 8, 2018 10:53 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- MSI
- Gigabyte
- ASRock
- EVGA
- Asus
- NZXT
- Supermicro
- Z390
MSI MAG Z390M Mortar
The MSI MAG Z390M Mortar is a mATX sized offering from the arsenal gamin range and on paper, is a slightly cut-down version of the Z390 Tomahawk. There are currently no visuals of the MAG Z390M Mortar as MSI doesn't intend to release the board until late October/early November, although there have released its official specifications and expected launch pricing.
As far as rear panels go, the MAG Z390M Mortar is the only of MSI's boards to have a trio of video outputs which includes a DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort. USB wise there is a USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A and Type-C port, as well as four USB 2.0 ports. MSI has opted to disregard USB 3.0 ports from the rear panel, but users looking to expand on what's available can do so through internal headers with up to four USB 2.0 and just two USB 3.0 ports available. The Z390M Mortar offers users five 3.5 mm audio jacks and an optical S/PDIF output thanks to a Realtek ALC892 HD audio codec and the single LAN port is powered by an Intel I219V Gigabit controller.
Storage capability on the MAG Z390M Mortar consists of four SATA ports and has two M.2 slots capable of supporting both PCIe and SATA drives. The Mortar also has two full-length PCIe 3.0 slots with the top receiving a coating of MSI's Steel Slot armor and operating at x16, whereas the bottom slot operates at x4 and is bare; MSI also includes a single PCIe 3.0 x1 slot. The lack of an x8 full-length slot means SLI is out of the question, but the Tomahawk does support 2-way CrossFire. Both of MSI's Z390 mATX sized boards have four RAM slots and the Z390M Mortar supports (INSERT MEMORY SUPPORT) and has room for a total capacity of up to 64 GB.
The MAG Z390M Mortar has a recommended MSRP of $145 and puts it as the cheapest gaming themed board from MSI; that's $35 cheaper than the MSI's other mATX option, the MSI MPGM Gaming Edge AC. Of course, the latter has integrated Wi-Fi all the while the Z390M Tomahawk does not and users looking to build a more wallet-friendly mATX gaming system is more likely to opt for this option.
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Valantar - Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - link
That would be pretty shocking, yeah, but the sheer size of that lump of metal still has me a bit worried. Guess that's what you get when you try to squeeze power delivery for a CPU that (likely) pulls >300W when overclocked into an ITX board (and refuse to use riser boards like before, for some reason).FXi - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
The power feed also changed with z390 I believe at least in the Asus models it did. The power feed of the 370 was "enough" to drive the newer 9700/9900 but there is a difference there that may impact enthusiasts. I don't think it enough to warrant an upgrade but something to consider.Also people should remember that while it is still a bit of a ways off, wifi is going to change to Wifi6 or 802.11ax starting now and probably seeing much of the changeover during 2019/2020 depending on adoption choices. And there is also pci-e 4.0 to consider next year probably that should be thought about before people do "marginal" upgrades from 370 era chipsets.
FXi - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
Silly thing posted in edit window. Sorry power delivery and other points covered by you. Would have edited if I could have found that optionDanNeely - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
Other things to look forward to in the next few generations are: Less-hacky USB3.1 implementations (eg this articles speculation that a 10g port will need to eat 2 HSIO lanes instead of 1, and still needing an extra chip to support USB-C). Spectre/Meltdown fixes in hardware. A reduced DMI bottleneck between the CPU and chipset (either just from upgrading the link to PCIe4/5, moving some of the peripheral IO onto the CPU, or both.Valantar - Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - link
Considering that the maximum theoretical bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 x1 is 984.6MB/s, you _need_ two PCIe lanes (and thus two HSIO lanes) for a USB 3.1G2 (1.25GB/s) controller unless you want to significantly bottleneck it. That's not "hacky", that's reality, even if this leaves a lot of bandwidth "on the table" if this only powers a single port (which it rarely does, though, and given that a full load on two ports at one time is unlikely, running two 1.25GB/s ports off two .99GB/s lanes is a good solution).Moving DMI to PCIe 4.0 will be good, though, particularly for multiple NVMe SSDs and >GbE networking.
DanNeely - Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - link
Splitting the traffic over 2 HSIO lanes is a hack because it'd require something to split/combine the traffic between the chipset and usbport. That in turn has me wondering if the speculation about the implementation being done that way is correct, or if the Z390 has 6 HSIO lanes that can run 10Gbps instead of the 8 that the rest top out at for PCIe3repoman27 - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
The implementation is absolutely not done that way. HSIO lanes are simply differential signaling pairs connected to a PCIe switch or various controllers via a mux. The PCH has a 6-port USB 3.1 Gen 2 xHCI, which can only feed 6 HSIO muxes. The back end of that xHCI is connected to an on-die PCIe switch which in turn is connected to the DMI interface. That DMI 3.0 x4 interface is already massively oversubscribed, but it is at least equivalent to a PCIe 3.0 x4 link, which is the most bandwidth that can be allotted to a single PCH connected device.Srikzquest - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
HDMI 2.0 is available in Asus and Gigabyte's ITX boards as well.gavbon - Tuesday, October 9, 2018 - link
Thank you Srikzquest; updated the tables, obviously missed this yesterday :) - Thanks againHickorySwitch - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
Correction:https://www.asus.com/us/Commercial-Servers-Worksta...
It says under "Specifications" that the board sports HDMI 2.0[b?]