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 Phantom Gaming 4
With the Z390 Phantom Gaming 4, ASRock has dropped the flashy LED lighting integrated into the heatsinks and offers users a further cut-down version at an entry-level price point ($140). The Z390 Phantom Gaming 4 keeps the same black and grey PCB theme, it removes the rear panel cover from the other Phantom Gaming boards outlined above and removes one of the power delivery heatsinks; this model is advertised as having a lower spec 10-phase power delivery. Also omitted from the Z390 Phantom Gaming 4 is Steel Slot protection. The board has two full-length PCIe 3.0 slots which run at x16 and x4 respectively, along with a total of three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots. Users looking to run SLI on a budget will need to look at ASRock's Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI board which is similar but costs $20 more.
The memory capability of the Z390 Phantom Gaming 4 consists of support for up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory and up to DDR4-4300. The board offers six SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays. Included are two PCIe 3.0 x and SATA compatible M.2 slots and on the cooling front, the Z390 Phantom Gaming 4 offers a total of four 4-pin fan headers.
On the rear panel, the Z390 Phantom Gaming 4 has two USB 3.1 Gen2 consisting of a single Type-A and Type-C port with two USB 3.0 Type-A and USB 2.0 ports. A single LAN port powered by an Intel I219V Gigabit networking controller and the three 3.5 mm audio controlled by a Realtek ALC892 HD codec are also featured. Just like the Z390 Phantom Gaming 6, the Z390 Phantom Gaming 4 has a trifecta of video outputs which are comprised of a D-sub, a DisplayPort and a single HDMI output.
With a much lower entry point into the market than the bigger Phantom Gaming 6 and 9 motherboards, the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 4 has a price of $140 which makes it the third cheapest Z390 board in ASRock's current SKU list and with Intel Gigabit LAN and a mid-ranged Realtek ALC892 codec, the Gaming 4 is seemingly targeted at gamers not looking to spend allocated budget on flashy aspects such as RGB and SLI support, but instead sticks to the important core componentry with minimal fuss.
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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?]