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
ASRock Z390 Extreme4
The ASRock Z390 Extreme4 hails from a long line Extreme4 branded boards which go as far back as Intel's Z77 chipset which was released back in 2012. Fast forward to now and the new Z390 Extreme4 has a semblance of the previous Z370 Extreme4 board but with some key differences. First of all the Z390 Extreme4 now includes an M.2 heatsink for the bottom slot and the rear panel cover has classier ASRock branding across it. The RGB LED lighting zones remain in the same places from the heatsinks and audio PCB cover and that's where the differences end; aside from specifications of course and the fact that this board has the newer Z390 chipset included. ASRock advertises a 12-phase power delivery and has included a pair of 12 V ATX CPU power inputs; an 8-pin and 4-pin. The board also has support for DDR4-4300 memory with up to 64 GB of capacity across four available RAM slots.
ASRock has kept the same PCIe slot layout as the Z370 Extreme4 with a total of three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots with the top two being treated to a coat of ASRocks Steel Slot protection; bandwidth wise they operate (from top to bottom) at x16, x8 and in x4. Also included are three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots and the board has support for up to two-way CrossFire and three-way SLI multi-graphics card configurations. The board has a total of four RAM slots with support for up to a maximum of 64 GB in total. Storage wise the Z390 Extreme4 has eight SATA ports with six coming from the chipset and another two from an ASMedia SATA controller with support for 0, 1, 5 and 10 RAID arrays. The two M.2 ports do feature support for both PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA, but it's worth pointing out that these likely that these slots will share bandwidth with other ports.
On the rear panel is two USB 3.1 Gen2 with a Type-A and Type-C port included along with a further four USB 3.0 Type-A ports. In addition to a PS/2 combo port is a trio of video outputs consisting of a DisplayPort, HDMI and a D-Sub. The Z390 Extreme4 doesn't have any wireless networking capability but there is scope to purchase an E-key PCIe adapter and the rear panel includes a bracket for it. The single wired LAN port is powered by an Intel I219V Gigabit controller while the S/PDIF and five 3.5 mm audio jacks are impelled by a good quality Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec.
The Extreme4 motherboards usually combine a good mixture of features, specifications and for the new iteration, the ASRock Z390 Extreme4 has a recommended launch price of $180 which is reasonable all things considered. The board has everything minus integrated Wi-Fi and is aimed more at enthusiasts than gamers; plenty of Phantom Gaming boards for those. There is the added wow factor of RGB built into the heatsinks and overall the design follows a much cleaner and neutral aesthetic than the new Phantom branded boards.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
79 Comments
View All Comments
Valantar - Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - link
That would be pretty shocking, yeah, but the sheer size of that lump of metal still has me a bit worried. Guess that's what you get when you try to squeeze power delivery for a CPU that (likely) pulls >300W when overclocked into an ITX board (and refuse to use riser boards like before, for some reason).FXi - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
The power feed also changed with z390 I believe at least in the Asus models it did. The power feed of the 370 was "enough" to drive the newer 9700/9900 but there is a difference there that may impact enthusiasts. I don't think it enough to warrant an upgrade but something to consider.Also people should remember that while it is still a bit of a ways off, wifi is going to change to Wifi6 or 802.11ax starting now and probably seeing much of the changeover during 2019/2020 depending on adoption choices. And there is also pci-e 4.0 to consider next year probably that should be thought about before people do "marginal" upgrades from 370 era chipsets.
FXi - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
Silly thing posted in edit window. Sorry power delivery and other points covered by you. Would have edited if I could have found that optionDanNeely - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
Other things to look forward to in the next few generations are: Less-hacky USB3.1 implementations (eg this articles speculation that a 10g port will need to eat 2 HSIO lanes instead of 1, and still needing an extra chip to support USB-C). Spectre/Meltdown fixes in hardware. A reduced DMI bottleneck between the CPU and chipset (either just from upgrading the link to PCIe4/5, moving some of the peripheral IO onto the CPU, or both.Valantar - Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - link
Considering that the maximum theoretical bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 x1 is 984.6MB/s, you _need_ two PCIe lanes (and thus two HSIO lanes) for a USB 3.1G2 (1.25GB/s) controller unless you want to significantly bottleneck it. That's not "hacky", that's reality, even if this leaves a lot of bandwidth "on the table" if this only powers a single port (which it rarely does, though, and given that a full load on two ports at one time is unlikely, running two 1.25GB/s ports off two .99GB/s lanes is a good solution).Moving DMI to PCIe 4.0 will be good, though, particularly for multiple NVMe SSDs and >GbE networking.
DanNeely - Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - link
Splitting the traffic over 2 HSIO lanes is a hack because it'd require something to split/combine the traffic between the chipset and usbport. That in turn has me wondering if the speculation about the implementation being done that way is correct, or if the Z390 has 6 HSIO lanes that can run 10Gbps instead of the 8 that the rest top out at for PCIe3repoman27 - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
The implementation is absolutely not done that way. HSIO lanes are simply differential signaling pairs connected to a PCIe switch or various controllers via a mux. The PCH has a 6-port USB 3.1 Gen 2 xHCI, which can only feed 6 HSIO muxes. The back end of that xHCI is connected to an on-die PCIe switch which in turn is connected to the DMI interface. That DMI 3.0 x4 interface is already massively oversubscribed, but it is at least equivalent to a PCIe 3.0 x4 link, which is the most bandwidth that can be allotted to a single PCH connected device.Srikzquest - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
HDMI 2.0 is available in Asus and Gigabyte's ITX boards as well.gavbon - Tuesday, October 9, 2018 - link
Thank you Srikzquest; updated the tables, obviously missed this yesterday :) - Thanks againHickorySwitch - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
Correction:https://www.asus.com/us/Commercial-Servers-Worksta...
It says under "Specifications" that the board sports HDMI 2.0[b?]