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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lmcd - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
8 cores is plenty for this generation of memory bandwidth. The problem is that Intel's next gen will have "16" processors where 8 are full cores, while AMD will have a full 16 cores with all that bandwidth. This generation, Intel is competitive but late.rahvin - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
Is this an attempt to be funny?pman6 - Tuesday, January 19, 2021 - link
meh. show me the $80 b560 boards.this is overkill for me.
Geef - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
Why is Intel always behind the game with memory speeds? 3200 is just a basic speed nowadays. Its great if your running CAS 14 chips but not many are. Why haven't they set a speed up to 4000 or 5000? They can keep XMP going just fine but wouldn't it be better to have systems automatically go that fast if they can?Deicidium369 - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
JEDEC tops out at 3200 - the fastest OFFICIAL speed it 3200. I have Gskill DDR4 4133 on my Gigabyte Z390 / i9900Kand JEDEC speeds are the same for AMD and Intel
Duncan Macdonald - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
For most games the 5800x is the sweet spot due to only having one CPU chiplet so no communication between chiplets. The 5900 and 5950 with two chiplets lose on many games due to the cost of inter chiplet communications exceeding the benefits from the extra cores.The 5900 and 5950 are best in programs that can make good use of all the cores (eg some video editing programs). For any game player with a 5900 or 5950, it might well be possible to get higher game performance by limiting Windows to only the first chiplet (using the numproc boot parameter).
Makaveli - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
I agree with you however the 5800X is really overpriced right now. So when you only have to pay abit more for the 5900X its looks like a far better deal. I think once Rocket lake is out we should see a price correction on the 5800X so the time to buy those will be in March.yeeeeman - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
This....this is wasted resources IMO. There was no need to make another platform on 14nm when they have the 10th gen which is just fine. I mean, the 10900k/10700k are great CPUs still, even compared to 5000 Ryzen series, so I don't know...they should've focused the efforts on bringing Alder Lake and its successor platforms forward.Hope Pat will make a bit of order here and make the schedules and ambitions of Intel a bit more daring, cause Bob just...milked it like there is no tomorrow. Refreshes after refreshes and refreshes.
Makaveli - Wednesday, January 20, 2021 - link
That's what happens when you have a finance guy running the company he is just going to keep the wheels turning and not be aggressive. The new guy is an engineer and I believe he will push the pace which is what Intel needs now.Oxford Guy - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
Well, the world really needed a stack of 15 boards from just one motherboard company, too.