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
Since TUF went not so TUF with the disregard of waves of thermal armor on their more rugged The Ultimate Force models, the TUF range was remodelled with a focus on offering gamers on a budget an entry route onto the key chipsets such as last year with the Z370 chipset and now with the new Z390 chipset. The rebadged and reskinned TUF Gaming range focus its attention on gaming-centric features such as a slightly cheaper Realtek S1200A HD audio codec, Intel I219V Gigabit LAN and a mix of black, grey and yellow accented visuals. The TUF Gaming Z390 models occupy the entry to mid-level of ASUS's Z390 product stack and slots between the professional series Prime and Strix gaming ranges.
ASUS TUF Z390 Pro Gaming
The ASUS TUF Z390 Pro Gaming represents the best and most feature rich of The Ultimate Force branded Z390 gaming based models with a similar visual design to that from the previous Z370 TUF Gaming motherboards. The TUF Z390 Gaming has a rear panel cover which houses the TUF Gaming branding and TUF logo, with the chipset heatsink featuring a similar design. There is no integrated RGB within this model but ASUS does include RGB headers for users looking to utilize the popular technology. There are four RAM slots with support for DDR4-4266 and up to 64 GB of system memory in total.
In terms of available PCIe capabilities, the TUF Z390 Pro Gaming has a total of three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots with only the top slot getting treated to the ASUS Safe Slot protection; these operate at x16, x8 and x4, with SLI supported with two NVIDIA cards installed forcing the PCIe to run at x8/x8. Users looking for PCIe 3.0 x1 slot support will be happy to find three on this model. A total of two PCIe 3.0 x4 supported M.2 slots are present with the bottom M.2 slot being complemented with an M.2 heatshield. In addition to this is a total of six SATA ports with two right-angled ports located below the 24-pin ATX motherboard power input and four straight-angled ports placed directly below the chipset heatsink.
The rear panel on the ASUS TUF Z390 Pro Gaming is what's expected from an entry-level model, but despite this, ASUS has utilized the integrated 10 Gbps USB from the Z390 chipset as the board has two USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A ports in addition to four USB 3.0 Type-A ports. An HDMI 1.4b and DisplayPort video output make up the onboard graphics support, while an Intel I219V Gigabit LAN and Realtek S1200A HD audio codec drive the onboard audio connectors. Last but not least, ASUS has included a PS/2 combination keyboard and mouse port.
The ASUS TUF Z390 Pro Gaming's price is as it stands unknown and this model represents the best of the entry-level range of gaming boards with support for both two-way SLI and CrossFire multi-graphics card configurations. The rear panel isn't comprehensive and the ATX Pro Gaming offers no Wi-Fi capable model opposed to the TUF Z390 Plus Gaming (Wi-Fi).
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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?]