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
ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac
One of two mini-ITX offerings from ASRock for the launch of the Z390 includes the gaming-centric Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac. The ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac follows an all-black design with speckly metallic heatsinks which includes RGB LED lighting at the bottom of the board. The main features include an Intel-based Gigabit LAN (I219V) and 2T2R Wave 2 802.11ac capable wi-fi adapter pairing and this board is one of the only Z390 motherboards to include a Thunderbolt 3Type-C port on the rear panel. The cooling capabilities are hindered slightly due to the form factor with a total of three 4-pin fan headers with two-thirds located along the top. There is an 8-pin 12 V ATX CPU power input and ASRock advertises an 8-phase power delivery; the SoC area of the power delivery is without a heatsink.
As the Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac is smaller it makes use of a single ASRock Steel Slot clad full-length PCIe 3.0 x16 slot with an M.2 slot located just above which offers support for PCIe 3.0 x4/SATA, while ASRock combines the chipset and M.2 heatsink as one to save space, but still offer the heat dissipation quality for hot running NVMe based drives. A second PCIe 3.0 x4/SATA slot is located on the rear of the boards PCB, while a total of four SATA ports with straight-angled connectors are located towards the bottom right of the board. Memory support consists of two slots with a maximum capacity of up to 32 GB and support for up to DDR4-4266.
The rear panel of the Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac motherboard offers a quality range of connections which puts a lot of boards to shame in this regard. Included is a Thunderbolt 3 Type-C ports with a total of four USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports. A single LAN port powered by an Intel I219V Gigabit networking chip is present along with five 3.5 mm audio jacks and a single S/PDIF optical output which is controlled by a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec. For users looking to use this board with integrated graphics, the Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac has two video outputs consisting of a DVI-D and an HDMI 2.0 outputFinishing off the rear panel is two connectors for the 2T2R Wave 2 802.11ac capable Wi-Fi antenna, a PS/2 combo port and a conveniently placed reset CMOS button.
In terms of pricing, the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac has an MSRP of $190 which is cheaper than I was expecting given the sheer amount of high-end features have been packed onto the PCB. The inclusion of a Thunderbolt 3 Type-C along with four USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A ports shows that where space has been used, it's been used to good effect; one of the benefits of the Z390 chipset is native USB 3.1 Gen2. A solid looking (visually) power delivery and with 2T2R Wave 2 802.11ac wireless capability marks another mini-ITX ASRock board aimed at the high-end enthusiast; I am personally very interested in seeing how this board performs as I'm a big fan of mini-ITX boards.
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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?]