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
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- Z390
MSI MPG Z390I Gaming Edge AC
The MSI MPG Z390I Gaming Edge AC isn't just the smallest form factored board of the MPG range, but it also represents the only mini-ITX sized motherboard in their Z390 product range. Like the other Gaming Edge AC boards on this page, this board features integrated Wi-Fi with an Intel 9462 802.11ac adapter which also includes support for the latest Bluetooth 5 standard.
As with other mini-ITX motherboards, the MSI MPG Z390I Gaming Edge AC has a single full-length PCIe 3.0 x16 slot which is surrounded in MSI's Steel Slot armor protection. The board has two M.2 slots with one slot only supporting PCIe and the other having support for both PCIe and SATA drives; one slot is located on the front which has a small inclusive heatsink, whereas the other slot is located on the rear of the PCB. The board also has of a total of four straight angled SATA ports with the ports split into pairs on either side of the two memory slots. The two memory slots have support for DDR4-4600 and with a maximum capacity of up to 32 GB.
With certain sacrifices usually being a necessity on mini-ITX motherboards, MSI has cut down the networking and audio support down to a pair of slightly lower quality (compared to the Z390/Z390M Gaming Edge AC boards) with a Realtek RTL8111H Gigabit controller and Realtek ALC892 HD audio codec pairing respectively. The mini-ITX offering has a total of two USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A ports with MSI disregarding Type-C connectivity; MSI has also included two USB 3.0 Type-A and two USB 2.0 ports. The front panel headers also allow for a further two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports to be utilized if required. Like the other Z390 Gaming Edge AC boards, this board also makes use of a DisplayPort and HDMI video outputs.
The MSI MPG Z390I Gaming Edge AC mini-ITX motherboard is expected to retail for $165 at launch and is an all-around decent offering which has been subjected to penalization due to the form factor. This is prevalent on the HD audio and networking aspect and unlike the mATX sized Gaming Edge AC doesn't feature 2T2R Wave2 Wi-Fi support to make up for the lesser quality pairing of Realtek controllers (audio and networking) included.
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di4b0liko - Tuesday, November 20, 2018 - link
Asus ROG STRIX Z390-F or asrock taichi ?pradeep.ramalingam - Friday, November 23, 2018 - link
Hi,I was wondering whether "MSI MPG Z390M Gaming Edge AC" with processor "Intel i5-9600K" will it work with onboard graphics (Intel® UHD Graphics 630) without a GPU from nvidia/amd?
Tigrou - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
"Z390 Motherboard Audio" panel in conclusion is incorrect. For example the MSI Z-390 A PRO has ALC892 but it is not in the list.Faslane - Wednesday, February 27, 2019 - link
Can you do a more in-depth overclocking guide for this board or is there one? if so may I please have a link to just a basic overclocking guide for this board? I have the board and loved it and I know I can go into the phantom gaming 4 app of course but I would rather do it at the BIOS level and save various profiles for testing but I'm a little new to some of the overclocking stuff but I do have a water cooled system with an 8th gen i5 9706 core so I know I can push it quite a bit :-)lb1966 - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Just bought an IBuyPower with this MB init.Anybody able to hook it up to a home theater receiver?
7.1 sounds great on the headphones but I gotta take them off every once in while. Can I use the rear audio panel?
electricjedi - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link
re: Asrock z390 gaming 4I know this does have a thunderbolt 5 pin header on the board, is this for thunderbolt 3?
Will the Asrock Thunderbolt 3 AIC R2.0 pci-e card work with this board?
or would I be smarter to get the GIGABYTE GC-ALPINE RIDGE (Rev 2.0) Thunderbolt3 Certified PCI-E Expansion card (since I know the z390 is "alpine ridge").
catminister - Saturday, November 28, 2020 - link
Also keep in mind that this board has no support for PCIe 4.0 or WIFI 6 802.11 AX in fact, it seems that Gigabyte abandons this board once purchased. If you want PCIe 4.0 to get the most out of the new Gen 4 NVMe M.2 drives or 802.11 AX support you are going to have to spend up and buy the X570 and a new CPU because socket 1151 is finished. A huge disappointment after recently upgrading to an Gigabyte Aorus Pro Wifi only this year...Turon - Saturday, December 25, 2021 - link
i can’t find the second ssd slot for the life of me, plz help.