Intel Z390 Motherboard Overview: 50+ Motherboards Analyzed
by Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on October 8, 2018 10:53 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
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- Z390
ASUS ROG Maximus XI Extreme
The flagship ASUS board always has been and always will be the Extreme models and the ROG Maximus XI Extreme is no different in this regard. Often considered as one of the flagship models when one does surface itself, the ROG Maximus XI Extreme offers one of the most unique aesthetical features on the Z390 chipset comes through a cleverly placed LiveDash OLED display which in the below image is displaying a 5.0 GHz overclock on the CPU. The board has tons of integrated RGB with a rear panel integrated with LEDs, with a chipset heatsink focused around the ROG logo also allowing users to customize it and an array of right-edge mounted underside RGB LEDs.
Not everything is about the aesthetic as the Extreme Z390 offers dual 8-pin 12 V ATX CPU power inputs and a dedicated ROG DIMM.2 slot for use with the included M.2 riser card which also includes a uniquely designed ROG heatsink. A total of four RAM slots with support for DDR4-4400 memory and up to a maximum capacity of 64 GB can be installed onto the board. The right-hand side of the board has an overclockers toolkit with a variety of DIP switches designed specifically for overclocking, with a dedicated start and reset switch just below the LED debug. There are rumours of a ROG Maximus XI Apex in the works which will offer much of the same in the way of extreme cooling capabilities, but with support for faster memory. Nothing is confirmed thus far and if the Apex does eventually show its X-shaped PCB on the market, expect me to jump for joy.
A total of six SATA ports and a trio of M.2 slots are present with one having support for SATA drives; all three M.2 slots are PCIe 3.0 x4 capable with one of these being directly fed into the ROG DIMM.2 slot for better cooling support. The board also has three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots which run at x16, x8 and x4 (x8/x8 or x8/x4/x4) and supports two-way SLI or three-way CrossFire multi-graphics configurations as a result.
Like all of the other Z390 Maximus XI motherboards, a Supreme-FX S1220 8-channel HD audio codec and single Intel I219V Gigabit NIC is featured and in addition to this is a high-performance Aquantia AQC111C 5 Gigabit powered LAN port. A total of ten USB ports is located on the rear panel with these being split into three different flavors; three USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A, one USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C and six USB 3.0 Type-A ports. The Extreme does include a standard HDMI video output and also features a BIOS Flashback button with a clear CMOS switch located next to it.
The ASUS ROG Maximus XI Extreme pricing and availablity is currently unknown, and this model represents the cream of the crop for the Z390 product stack from ASUS. The highly customizable ASUS AURA Sync RGB LED lighting is something which draws my eye and its combination of high-end components such as 5 Gigabit LAN and 2T2R Intel 9560 802.11ac Wi-Fi support as being more useful additions. Extreme overclockers will be looking around for the arrival of the Z390 Maximus XI Apex if ASUS has one in the works, primarily for the shorter memory traces to the CPU socket for unmatched memory performance when benchmarking.
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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?]