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
MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC
Starting with the ATX sized model of a trio of Gaming Edge MSI MPG (performance) range boards, the MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC as the name suggests means it has built-in wireless networking support; this is provided by a standard Intel 9462 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter which is compliant with the latest Bluetooth 5 connectivity. The overall design and layout looks very similar to the MPG Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon AC with near identical PCBs, but with primarily visual differences such as heatsinks.
The MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC has three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots with the top two slots being treated to MSI's Steel Slot armor, while the bottom slot is bare. The slots operate at x16, x8 and x4 respectively meaning three-way Crossfire and two-way SLI multi-graphics card setups are supported. For the memory, the board has four RAM slots with support for DDR4-4400 with a total capacity for up to 64 GB. The storage is facilitated by a pair of M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4/SATA slots and six SATA ports capable of supporting RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays.
On the rear panel, MSI has included two USB 3.1 Gen2 ports which are comprised of a Type-A and Type-C port, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports and two USB 2.0 ports. There is expansion through internal headers to extend USB support to a further four USB 3.0, four USB 2.0 and an additional single USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port. The five 3.5 mm gold plated audio jacks and optical S/PDIF output are handled by a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec, whereas the single LAN port is powered by an Intel I219V Gigabit controller. Unlike the MEG series, the MPG models do offer video outputs with the MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC offering a pairing consisting of an HDMI and DisplayPort.
The primary target market for the MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC is the mid-range and with a suggested launch price of $190, it represents a more conservative approach with fewer features overall, but keeping the bulk of the premium controllers featured on the more expensive MPG Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon AC such as the Realtek ALC1220 audio codec.
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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?]