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 Prime Z390-P
In comparison to the above ASUS Prime Z390-A, the aesthetically more 'out-there' Prime Z390-P has a white and black theme stretching as if a wave of triangles flew through the air and splattered across the board in what can only be described as rays. This board also features a set of basic looking heatsinks without a rear panel cover with all of the appeal coming from the onboard set of controllers and componentry, with a clear focus on the value being the ulterior motive of this particular offering.
The most basic of the ASUS Z390 range still retains impressive support for DDR4-4266 with up to a maximum of 64 GB across the four RAM slots allowed. The PCIe configuration is also basic with a full-length PCIe 3.0 x16 slot and two full-length PCIe 3.0 x4 slots and three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots offering support for two-way CrossFire multi-graphics card configurations. Storage support is offered through two M.2 slots with support for both PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA drives, and a more basic looking set of four SATA ports which all feature cheaper straight-angled connectors.
A pair of USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A and four USB 3.0 Type-A ports make up the boards USB connectivity with a pair of PS/2 ports and a DisplayPort and HDMI duo of video outputs on the board. The cheapest and basic of the ASUS Z390 motherboards has a Realtek RTL8111H Gigabit LAN port and Realtek ALC892 powered trio of 3.5 mm audio jacks which completes the rear panel.
The ASUS Prime Z390-P loos set to release as the cheapest Z390 board with the MSRP remainign unknown as of yet. The most basic and entry-level board offers a Realtek controller pairing which cuts down as much cost as possible, even with the use of straight-angled SATA ports to shave as much cost off as humanly possible. The Prime Z390-P is probably not the board to be considering for one of the new 8-core Intel Core i7-9900K processors, especially where overclocking is concerned due to the small and lightweight looking power delivery heatsinks.
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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?]