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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- 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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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.