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
ASUS ROG Maximus XI Gene
The last time the market has seen a high-performance mATX motherboard on a mainstream desktop chipset from ASUS was back in 2015 with the Z170 chipset Maximus VIII Gene. Since then loyal ASUS users looking for a replacement of sorts has had to opt for a gaming-focused Strix branded mATX model, until now. The Gene is back and it's back with a slightly different approach as the new ROG Maximus XI Gene drops four RAM slots and opts for two which has support for DDR4-4600 which is the fastest rated out of the box from any Z390 at launch. ; this is news that will please enthusiasts and extreme overclockers who favor two slot memory configurations for better latency thanks to shorter memory tracks. Touching more on the memory, one of the biggest features is official support for the brand new double height, double capacity 32 GB SO-DIMMs that are expected to come to the market very soon; we reported on this a week or so ago. This means the board will have support for up to 64 GB of system memory over the two available RAM slots. Another enthusiast level feature is an LED debug, set of dip switches which will most certainly be related to LN2 and sub-zero cooling with what seemingly looks like a reset CMOS button, reset switch and a start button.
On the tightly packed PCB of the mATX Maximus XI Gene, ASUS has included the ROG DIMM.2 M.2 slot which supports PCIe 3.0 x4 directly from the CPU. There are two internal M.2 slots on the board with support for PCIe 3.0 x4 drives with bandwidth coming from the PCH; the official specification does not mention SATA M.2 SSD support, so unless these will change as the board is released, it remains unknown. We know the Z390 ROG Gene will have four SATA ports and support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 will feature. The board visually looks as if it might house a 10+2 phase power delivery and is supported by two 8-pin 12 V ATX CPU power inputs making this one of the most powerful non-ATX motherboards on the entire platform; especially enticing for extreme overclockers to sink their teeth into.
While we don't have any other images available as of yet other than the one VideoCardz leaked out, we can confirm the ROG Maximus XI Gene is on, we can confirm it's in the ASUS Z390 product stack and the specifications noted above are directly from ASUS; it is coming and it's nice to see the Gene make a return after three years out. Like a mini-ITX board would, the mATX Gene has only one full-length PCIe 3.0 x16 slot with a smaller PCIe 3.0 x4 slot located just above this which is believed to be for M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4.
On the rear panel will include plenty of USB connectivity including three USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A, one USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C, and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports. A single HDMI video output is present along with a single Intel I219V Gigabit powered LAN port and onboard audio selection consisting of five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/DPIF optical output controlled by a gaming-focused Supreme FX S1220 audio codec. The Maximus XI Gene also includes an Intel 9560 Wi-Fi adapter which supports Wave 2 1.73 Gbps wireless connectivity as well as Bluetooth 5 support. That's all we currently know about the rear panel.
There is currently no pricing or information on the availability as of yet for the mATX sized ROG Maximus XI Gene, but we expect ASUS will look to release this towards the end of October or early November.
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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?]