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
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- NZXT
- Supermicro
- Z390
GIGABYTE Z390 UD (Ultra Durable)
The GIGABYTE Z390 UD or Z390 Ultra Durable motherboard is ATX in size and drops all of the gaming branding and fluff associated with that for a cleaner and basic looking board. The black PCB has grey side sweeping straight patterning across the majority and combines it with the chipset heatsink. The board has a total of three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots with the top slot which is covered in metal slot protection supporting x16 and the two other bare full-length slots operating at x4; the board also features three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots. The board also has the same 8 and 4-pin 12V ATX power inputs as the Z390 Gaming SLI, Z390 Gaming X and Z390M Gaming models.
Storage wise the Z390 UD has a total of six SATA ports which are comprised of two right-angled connectors, with another bank of four featuring straight-angle connectors sitting just below. Above the PCIe slots is a single M.2 slot which supports both PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA drives. For the memory up to a total of 64 GB can be installed across the four available RAM slots, with official XMP profiling currently being unannounced.
On the rear panel of the Z390 UD is a total of six USB 3.0 Type-A ports, a pair of PS/2 ports for a keyboard and mouse and an HDMI video output. This board drops any USB 3.1 Gen2 connectivity to shave on costs and isn't just the only GIGABYTE board to do so, but it's also using a cheaper Realtek ALC887 audio codec and Realtek RTL8111H Gigabit networking controller to power three 3.5 mm audio jacks and the single LAN port.
Without much pizazz and the gaming designed feature set, the Z390 UD (Ultra Durable) is targeted more towards budget systems and more professional users who aren't looking to spend extra budget on features deemed unnecessary which may for all intents and purposes remain unused. The Z390 UD costs $130 and as it stands, is the cheapest offering from GIGABYTE on Z390 as it represents one of the more modest entry-level Z390 offerings from any of the motherboard vendors at launch.
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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?]