The Intel Z590 Motherboard Overview: 50+ Motherboards Detailed
by Gavin Bonshor on January 19, 2021 10:15 AM ESTGIGABYTE Z590 Aorus Xtreme & Xtreme WaterForce
GIGABYTE's flagship for Z590 is the Aorus Xtreme, with an Xtreme WaterForce model for users with custom water cooling. GIGABYTE has gone for a darker look for Z590 when compared to the Z490 Aorus Xtreme, with an all-black aesthetic that looks clean and stylish. The Z590 Aorus Xtreme WaterForce uses a large custom monoblock, which provides cooling to the CPU and the board's large 20+1 phase power delivery. The general design includes RGB LED lighting, which is installed into the rear panel cover and chipset heatsink.
At the top right-hand corner is a two-digit LED debugger, with a power and reset button embedded within a panel covering a right-angled 24-pin 12 V ATX power input. Covering the rest of the PCB is a plethora of black PCIe armor, which blends the M.2 heatsinks into the design. Coated with armor reinforcement, the Z590 Aorus Xtreme includes three full-length slots with two PCIe 4.0 that can operate at x16 or x8/x8, with a third slot electronically locked down to PCIe 3.0 x4. GIGABYTE includes four memory slots capable of supporting up to DDR4-5000, with a total capacity of up to 128 GB across four memory slots. For storage, GIGABYTE includes three M.2 slots, with one operating at PCIe 4.0 x4, two at PCIe 3.0 x4, with six SATA ports offering support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays.
On the rear panel of both the Z590 Aorus Xtreme and Xtreme WaterForce is dual Thunderbolt 4 Type-C, with eight USB 3.2 G2 Type-A ports and one HDMI video output. A Realtek ALC1220-VB HD audio codec and ESS Sabre ES9018K2M DAC power the five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical output, while at the left-hand side, GIGABYTE has included a Clear CMOS and Q-Flash Plus button. Finishing off the rear panel is a pair of Ethernet ports, one through an Aquantia 10 GbE controller and the other by an Intel I225-V 2.5 GbE controller, with antenna ports for Intel's AX210 Wi-Fi 6E CNVi.
At the time of writing, GIGABYTE hasn't shared any details on its Z590 models' pricing.
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Duncan Macdonald - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
Why so many motherboards for a product (Rocket Lake) that is outclassed before it is even available by the Zen 3 processors from AMD.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
Mindshare. Intel still means better FPS to some gamers. I also hear AMD’s CPUs are hard to get, except for the 5800x which some believe is overpriced. My local MicroCenter was out of all but that one. I just checked and it has exactly 1 in stock. That’s it for the entire line.Deicidium369 - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
LOL - except it isn't - Zen 3 is nothing but more and more cache to cheese the synthetic benchmarks and impress the rubes. When you actually get a 5900X and a 5950X as I have you start to realize, that like the 6900XT - all AMD smoke and mirrors and little substance.Rocket Lake will wreck Zen 3 - and all the fanboyism won't change that - and one big plus for Rocket Lake is that it will be available in volume while TSMC scraps to get supplies - and Apple has priority - then AMD for the consoles - and whatever small crumbs that are left go to the AMD PC products. New microarch vs cache masquerading as a CPU - easy Intel win.
eva02langley - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
LMAO ROXXORMYBOXXORJust look at how stupid it sounds... you sound like this.
1. ES of Rocket Lake are showing REGRESSION in performances even in games.
2. It passes from 10 cores to 8 cores.
3. The prices are still the same... way overpriced compared to AMD...
4. AMD is looking like it will retain the performances crown in ST and MT performances.
Spunjji - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
"Rocket Lake will wreck Zen 3"Mate, Intel's own leaked benches are already disproving that. You're bending language so hard here that apparently a maximum 5% performance advantage in cherry-picked games at 1080p = "wrecked", and that's at nearly 1/2 the performance per watt.
It's amusing to see how literally all of the Intel shills across multiple sites have switched to banging on about stock levels. Do you have a secret site where you coordinate this, or do you just copy each other naturally? 🤣
Makaveli - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
lol man this thread is pulling out all the weirdo's tonight.We got that guy stuck in 2008 and intel fan boys...
Oxford Guy - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
Thanks for spamming the topic with your insipid arrogance.gsuburban - Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - link
Lots of folks are looking for the 4th gen NVMe speeds. Also, they are getting more USB 3 and USB C ports that many of the newer cases come with located up front. Also, for those that don't need a video card, the 11th gen CPU's, the upper level ones, support HDMI 2.0 vs. HDMI 1.4 and have a different graphics chip, the UHD750. Other than these, there are not many other benefits however, cost wise at this time, its the same cost to spend on last years hardware so it seems more reasonable to buy this years hardware for the same price. It wouldn't be much value to take a 3 year old system and upgrade to this years hardware as the gains are not worth the cost.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
Does running a display via Thunderbolt add latency?croc - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
The issue I see here is that Intel's first foray into PCIe 4.0 seems designed to meet, not exceed AMD's efforts. If you are behind the competition, then just meeting their specs is not the way to get ahead. Then there is Rocket Lake's max core count. Max of eight, due to the backporting of the 10nm Sunny Cove cores onto the 14nm litho. OK, AMD's 16 cores may be a bit overkill (for gaming) given the lack of PCIe lanes on their AM4 socket, but Intel is replacing a CPU that topped out at 10 cores with a CPU only allowing eight...Can't wait for the return of Gelsinger's return. I predict a large ship turning around at speed. Watch out for bow waves....