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
MSI MEG Z390 ACE
The MSI MEG Z390 ACE doesn't quite have as many features available as the bigger MEG Z390 GODLIKE, but the ACE variant of MSI's Enthusiast range is still pretty comprehensive all things considered. The overall design is neutral like all of MSIs MPG, MEG and MAG Z390 offerings and has an all-black matte PCB with silvery heatsinks and the board itself conforms to the standard ATX form factor. Like the GODLIKE the ACE has a total of four available RGB headers with integrated RGB LEDs within the rear IO cover being the most prominent.
There is a total of three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots which all feature MSI Steel Slot reinforcement and each slot from top to bottom operates at x16, x8 and x4. This means three-way CrossFire is supported as well as two-way SLI; the board also has three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots. Memory support comes through four RAM slots with maximum capacity allowed for 64 GB and the MEG Z390 ACE has compatibility out of the box for up to DDR4-4500.
Looking at storage support, MSI has included a total of three M.2 slots with one having support for just PCIe drives, with the other two having support for both PCIe and SATA drives. The board also makes use of six SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays.
On the rear panel, MSI has included three USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A ports as well as a single USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C. In addition to this is a further four USB 2.0 ports with the board disregarding any USB 3.0 from the rear panel, but there is the capacity to extend the USB through the use of front panel headers (four USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0. The 8-channel audio is handled by a single Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec and the single LAN port on the rear is controlled by a Killer E2500 Gigabit chip. MSI has included Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 capability on the Z390 ACE thanks to an integrated Intel 9560 2T2R 802.11ac wireless adapter.
The MSI MEG Z390 ACE is set to retail for $290 at launch which is reasonable given what MSI has included in terms of premium controllers such as the Realtek ALC1220, Killer E2500 Gigabit and Intel 9560 2T2R networking controllers. Like the Z390 GODLIKE, the ACE also includes an integrated rear panel IO cover.
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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?]