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
ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI/ac
The ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI/ac is available with or without Wi-Fi which gives users the choice if they want to spend the extra for wireless capability or save money if wireless doesn't feature into the plan; the price variance is expected to be just $10 during launch. The Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI is a slightly different take on ASRock's own Z390 Phantom Gaming 6 and Phantom Gaming 4 boards and sits right in between them in terms of features and pricing in the current ASRock product stack. The board has a total of five 4-pin fan headers, has an advertised 10-phase power delivery and offers users a single 8-pin 12 V ATX CPU power input.
With this being an SLI supported model as the name suggests, the Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI has two full-length PCIe 3.0 slots which run at x16 and x8, with an additional four PCIe 3.0 x 1 slots. Both full-length slots are treated to ASRock's Steel Slot armor protection and the board supports up to two-way SLI and two-way CrossFire multi-graphics card setups. The board has two PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA supported M.2 slots with the bottom slot being complemented by an M.2 heatsink, while users looking to use SATA based devices will be happy to know the board has the Z390's maximum supported allocation of six ports. The board has four RAM slots which support up to DDR4-4266 and with a total combined capacity of up to 64 GB.
On the networking front the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI and Phantom Gaming SLI/ac models both feature a single Realtek RTL8125AG 2.5 G LAN with the latter model also including an 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter; this is the only difference between both of the aforementioned models. Both boards have a total of six USB ports on the rear which is comprised of a single USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A, a single USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C and four USB 3.0 ports. The Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI also features a pair of HDMI and DVI-D display outputs, a PS/2 combo port and a single S/PDIF, with five 3.5 mm audio jacks powered by a Realtek ALC892 HD audio codec.
The ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI has an MSRP of $160 and the Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI/ac has an MSRP of $170; a price premium of $10 for the integration of 802.11ac wireless networking is fair as a decent quality USB based network adapter can cost this, and more depending on the brand. ASRock has aimed both these models primarily at gamers and with the inclusion of 2.5 G Realtek LAN and a Realtek ALC892 audio codec, I think it would have been a smarter choice to use a Gigabit LAN and use the savings to upgrade the codec to the better quality Realtek ALC1220 offering, but the inclusion of the new Realtek 2.5 G RT8125AG gaming LAN is something not to be sniffed at!
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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?]