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
GIGABYTE Z390 Aorus Elite
The GIGABYTE Z390 Aorus Elite is a little more 'basic' in terms of aesthetics than the Z390 Aorus Master and although the board has a similar rear panel cover and features integrated RGB LED lighting, the Z390 Aorus Elite belongs to the low to mid-range of Z390 options available. As per GIGABYTE's new naming scheme, one thing we do know is that the Z390 Aorus Elite replaces the Z370 Aorus Gaming 3 in the low-end Z390 entry segment. Official memory support out of the box consists of DDR4-4133 with up to 64 GB supported across four available RAM slots.
On the rear panel, GIGABYTE has included two USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A, four USB 3.0 Type-A and four USB 2.0 ports. Also featured are a single HDMI video output and a single LAN port controlled by an Intel I219V Gigabit networking chip. The onboard audio is directed by a Realtek ALC1220-VB HD audio codec and offers a total of five 3.5mm audio jacks and a single S/PDIF optical output.
Like the majority of the boards in GIGABYTEs Z390 product stack, the Z390 Aorus Elite is advertised as having a 13-phase power delivery in a 12+1 configuration. The board has two full-length PCIe slots with the top slot with support for two-way CrossFire configurations. In addition to the full-length slots is a total of three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots. In terms of storage, the Z390 Aorus Elite has a total of two M.2 slots with the top slot getting treated to an M.2 heat shield. As with most Z390 motherboards, there is a total of six SATA ports which allows for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays to be utilized.
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The Z390 Aorus Elite is targeted more towards gamers on a budget with an MSRP of $180 and as previously mentioned, replaces the Z370 Aorus Gaming 3 in GIGABYTEs previous product stack making this the cheapest of their Z390 gaming themed ATX sized motherboards. There is no scope for SLI due to bandwidth restrictions on the second full-length PCIe 3.0 x4 slot (SLI requires x8 minimum), but users planning on running an AMD based graphics card can effectively double if they so wish.
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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?]