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
ASUS TUF Z390 Plus Gaming
ASUS TUF Z390 Plus Gaming Wi-Fi
The TUF Z390 Plus Gaming and the Wi-Fi inclusive TUF Z390 Plus Gaming Wi-Fi are a pair of ATX sized motherboards which sits just below the TUF Z390 Pro Gaming in the current Z390 product stack from ASUS. The main difference in specification between the Pro Gaming and the Plus gaming is that this model has no support for two-way SLI due to bandwidth restrictions on the second full-length PCIe slot. The PCIe 3.0 slot configuration on the Z390 Plus Gaming and Wi-Fi enabled model is slightly different with two full-length PCIe 3.0 lanes with the top operating at x16 and the second at just x4; this is in addition to four PCIe 3.0 x1 slots.
Visually the boards have an all-black look with black rear panel covers and black heatsinks; a lot of blacks but this is offset with yellow colored TUF gaming accenting across the heatsinks and around the PCB of the socket area. The TUF Z390 Plus Gaming and Plus Gaming Wi-Fi have two PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots with the bottom slot having a heatshield integrated on the board; only one of the M.2 slots has support for SATA drives. A total of six SATA ports is also present with support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays.
ASUS TUF Z390 Plus Gaming Wi-Fi rear panel (only difference is wireless support)
The rear panels on both models include two USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A and four USB 3.0 Type-A ports, with a pair of video outputs consisting of a DisplayPort and HDMI. Two separate PS/2 ports for a keyboard and mouse are included as well as an Intel I219V Gigabit powered LAN port and three 3.5 mm audio jacks taking their direction from a Realtek S1200A HD audio codec. The only difference between both models comes with a pair of antenna connectors provided by an Intel 9560 2x2 MU-MIMO Wave 2 Wi-Fi adapter.
The ASUS TUF Z390 Plus Gaming has an MSRP of (INSERT PRICE) and occupies the entry-level segment of the gaming based market. The more expensive TUF Z390 Plus Gaming Wi-Fi costs (INSERT PRICE) with the premium clearly attributed to the included Intel 9560 1.73 Gbps capable Wi-Fi adapter. Both look attractive at their respective price points and users have the option with or without Wi-Fi capability.
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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?]