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
The ASUS ROG Strix range of motherboards slot right in between the Maximus XI and TUF Gaming ranges but with a mixture of features and traits from both ranges to keep pricing competitive with other vendors mid-range offerings. These affordable models do have a good range of overclocking, but without the extreme components and more importantly, without the larger price tags associated with the higher echelon of Maximus XI models.
ASUS ROG Strix Z390-E Gaming
The ASUS ROG Strix Z390-E is another Z370 model to get an overhaul of sorts ready for the new 9th generation Intel processors. The newer Strix Z390-E looks relatively similar in terms of PCB space. The main differences come visually with the new Z390-E having primarily black themed heatsinks with a customizable RGB ROG logo with ROG Edge holographic branding towards the bottom of the rear panel cover. The chipset heatsink features the Strix branding and has a metallic grey and black monotone design.
Across the center of the board are three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots which run at x16, x8 and x4 which means two-way SLI and up to three-way CrossFire multi-graphics card configurations are supported. The Z390-E also has three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots which give users one less than the previous Z370-E. Storage wise the Z390-E has two M.2 slots with one dedicated to just PCIe 3.0 x4 drives and the second allowing for both PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA drives to be used; both M.2 slots have inclusive heatsinks. The board also has a total of six SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays. There are four RAM slots with official support for up to DDR4-4266 with a total capacity of up to 64 GB.
On the rear panel of the mid-ranged Strix Z390-E Gaming is a varied selection of input and outputs. USB support consists of three USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A, one USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C, two USB 3.0 Type-A and two USB 2.0 ports. A pair of video outputs consisting of a DisplayPort and HDMI are featured, along with a PS/2 combo port, an Intel I219V Gigabit controlled LAN port and connectors for the 2T2R 802.11ac Intel 9560 Wi-Fi adapter. Finishing off the rear panel is five 3.5 mm audio jacks and a single S/PDIF optical output powered by the ROG SupremeFX S1220A HD audio codec.
The ASUS ROG Strix Z390-E Gaming pricing is unknown at present and represents the most feature-rich of the Strix branded gaming motherboards. The main difference between the Z390-E Gaming and the other ATX sized Z390 Strix based models are the inclusion of the 1.73 Gbps capable Wi-Fi adapter with Bluetooth 5 connectivity support; this is one of the main reasons for the increase in price too.
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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?]