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
GIGABYTE Z390 Gaming X
The GIGABYTE Z390 Gaming X looks to share a very similar PCB and design as the Z390 Gaming SLI with a black and silver design (red accents) but looks to enter the market at a lower price point. Both boards feature much of the same characteristics including power delivery, dual 8 and 4-pin CPU power inputs and PCIe slot layout, but replaces Realtek ALC1220-VB codec and instead opts for a cheaper Realtek ALC892. The Gaming X drops SLI support and features two full-length PCIe 3.0 slots which run at x16 and x4 respectively. The top slot also has a coating of metal PCIe slot protection and two-way CrossFire is officially supported; there are also three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots included on the board.
On the storage front, the Z390 Gaming X has a pair of PCIe 3.0 x4/SATA M.2 slots with the top slot being treated to an M.2 heatsink. The board also has a total of six SATA ports which allow for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays to be used. The board also offers a maximum capacity of up to 64 GB of system memory, with the rated XMP specification currently unknown as of yet.
USB wise the board has a total of eight ports which consist of one USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A, five USB 3.0 Type-A and two USB 2.0 ports; an additional two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports can be made available through the internal headers on the board. The rest of the rear panel consists of a single HDMI out, a PS/2 combo port, a single LAN port powered by an Intel I219V Gigabit controller and six 3.5 mm audio jacks which are controlled by a Realtek ALC892 HD audio codec.
The GIGABYTE Z390 Gaming X's pricing stands at $150 as it sits towards the bottom of GIGABYTEs Z390 product range. The board is aimed towards gamers with lower budgets and looks to make GIGABYTE competitive in the entry-level Z390 market.
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di4b0liko - Tuesday, November 20, 2018 - link
Asus ROG STRIX Z390-F or asrock taichi ?pradeep.ramalingam - Friday, November 23, 2018 - link
Hi,I was wondering whether "MSI MPG Z390M Gaming Edge AC" with processor "Intel i5-9600K" will it work with onboard graphics (Intel® UHD Graphics 630) without a GPU from nvidia/amd?
Tigrou - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
"Z390 Motherboard Audio" panel in conclusion is incorrect. For example the MSI Z-390 A PRO has ALC892 but it is not in the list.Faslane - Wednesday, February 27, 2019 - link
Can you do a more in-depth overclocking guide for this board or is there one? if so may I please have a link to just a basic overclocking guide for this board? I have the board and loved it and I know I can go into the phantom gaming 4 app of course but I would rather do it at the BIOS level and save various profiles for testing but I'm a little new to some of the overclocking stuff but I do have a water cooled system with an 8th gen i5 9706 core so I know I can push it quite a bit :-)lb1966 - Thursday, April 11, 2019 - link
Just bought an IBuyPower with this MB init.Anybody able to hook it up to a home theater receiver?
7.1 sounds great on the headphones but I gotta take them off every once in while. Can I use the rear audio panel?
electricjedi - Thursday, January 9, 2020 - link
re: Asrock z390 gaming 4I know this does have a thunderbolt 5 pin header on the board, is this for thunderbolt 3?
Will the Asrock Thunderbolt 3 AIC R2.0 pci-e card work with this board?
or would I be smarter to get the GIGABYTE GC-ALPINE RIDGE (Rev 2.0) Thunderbolt3 Certified PCI-E Expansion card (since I know the z390 is "alpine ridge").
catminister - Saturday, November 28, 2020 - link
Also keep in mind that this board has no support for PCIe 4.0 or WIFI 6 802.11 AX in fact, it seems that Gigabyte abandons this board once purchased. If you want PCIe 4.0 to get the most out of the new Gen 4 NVMe M.2 drives or 802.11 AX support you are going to have to spend up and buy the X570 and a new CPU because socket 1151 is finished. A huge disappointment after recently upgrading to an Gigabyte Aorus Pro Wifi only this year...Turon - Saturday, December 25, 2021 - link
i can’t find the second ssd slot for the life of me, plz help.