Intel Z390 Motherboard Overview: 50+ Motherboards Analyzed
by Ian Cutress & Gavin Bonshor on October 8, 2018 10:53 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
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- Z390
GIGABYTE Z390 Gaming SLI
Not all of GIGABYTE's gaming range is underneath the Aorus banner and the primary example on the Z390 chipset is the Z390 Gaming SLI. In regards to the design, the board has a black color scheme throughout with slim red accents on both the power delivery and chipset heatsinks. The board makes use of three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots with the top slot operating at x16, the middle slot at x8 and the bottom at x4. The top and middle slot have a coating of metallic slot protection and due to the middle slot operating at x8 and as the name suggests, this model does support two-way SLI graphics configurations. The onboard Realtek ALC1220-VB codec has EMI shielding and the power delivery looks to be running in an 8+4 or 10+2 configuration; this is supplemented by a pair of 12 V ATX CPU power inputs which consists of an 8-pin and a 4-pin.
Memory support on the Z390 Gaming SLI consists of four RAM slots with a maximum capacity of up to 64 GB; the maximum rated XMP profile is currently unknown as of yet. The onboard audio is provided by a Realtek ALC1220-VB audio codec which offers six 3.5 mm audio jacks on the rear panel; the single LAN port is controlled by an Intel I219V Gigabit networking chip. A total of eight USB Type-A ports are present which are split into two USB 3.1 Gen2 and six USB 3.0, with a combo PS/2 port and a single HDMI video output also present.
While this board is similar in spec to the Z390 Aorus Elite, it currently costs just $160 and represents one of GIGABYTEs cheapest Z390 models at launch. Based on this the targetted segment is likely to be budget gaming with certain cost-cutting measures in place such as rear panel connections, but without sacrificing on support and componentry such as power delivery needed to run Intel's top 9th generation processor the Core i9-9900K.
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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?]