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
Supermicro C9Z390-CGW
The SuperO C9Z390-CGW is an ATX sized model which is targeted towards gamers looking to utilize some of the more premium features as the PGW model, but with some obvious cutbacks. The C9Z390-CGW has two full-length PCIe 3.0 slots which operate at ether x16/x4 with the bottom PCIe 3.0 x4 slot populated at the bottom and/or x16/x8 and the bottom slot is disabled when the second full-slot is in use. bottom. Sandwiched in between the full-length slots are three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots with a pair of M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slots with heatsinks also among the PCI. Other storage options include six SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays. Memory support is slightly lower than the PGW with the CGW supporting up to DDR4-3866 and up to a maximum capacity of 64 GB across four available slots. Like the flagship PGW model featured above, the CGW also features five 4-pin fan headers with one of the headers being designated to water cooling pumps.
On the rear panel of the C9Z390-CGW are three USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A ports with an additional Gen2 Type-C port and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports making up the rest of the USB connectors. A total of two LAN ports are present with one coming via an Aquantia AQC107 10G NIC with the other being controlled by an Intel I219V Gigabit chip. The five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical out are powered by a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec and the board also includes a PS/2 combo port, two DisplayPort 1.2 outputs, a single HDMI 1.4 output and two antenna connectors for the included 802.11ac dual-band Wi-Fi adapter; this also provides users with Bluetooth 5 connectivity.
The Supermicro C9Z390-CGW takes certain elements of the flagship C9Z390-CGW such as 10G Aquantia networking, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity with two full-length slots offering x16 bandwidth on both for unrestrictive bandwidth when running two-way CrossFire and SLI setups; it's quite likely the bottom PCIe 3.0 x4 shares bandwidth with the M.2 slots. The C9Z390-CGW slots right underneath the more comprehensive PGW, but as of yet initial pricing is currently unknown.
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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.