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
Professional users looking to purchase an ASUS Z390 board without much of the cost-upping controllers and aesthetics will probably be looking towards the Prime series. The Prime series offers an entry-level jump onto the chipset with bare minimum features, but like the rest of the Z390 chipset, they still support overclocking through the Z390 chipset and look to offer better value overall than the far-reaching gaming targeted boards.
ASUS Prime Z390-A
Starting with the premier entry-level Prime range, the ASUS Prime Z390-A is an ATX sized motherboard and features a white, silver and black design throughout. The board has a white rear panel cover and chipset heatsink, with integrated RGB on both with support for ASUS AURA Sync. The PCB has a white patterning which contrasts quite nicely and represents one of the more subtle looking ASUS Z390 options. The Prime Z390-A has three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots with two getting treated to ASUS Safe slot armor protection and the slots operate at x16, x8 and x4 from top to bottom. This means the Prime Z390-A officially supports two-way SLI and up to three-way CrossFire multi-graphics card configurations.
Memory capability comes from four RAM slots with support for DDR4-4266 and a maximum capacity of up to 64 GB. The storage solutions offered on the Prime Z390-A include two PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots, with only one of them offering support for SATA drives; this seems to be a regular occurrence on the ASUS Z390 line-up. Also included are six SATA ports with the ability to operate RAID 0, 1, 5 or 10 arrays.
This top Prime Z390 model has a total of seven USB ports consisting of three USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A, one USB 3.1 Type-C, two USB 3.0 Type-A and two USB 2.0 ports. A combined total of six audio ports split into five 3.5 mm audio jacks and single S/PDIF optical output controlled by a Realtek S1220A HD 8-channel audio codec, with a single LAN port being powered by an Intel I219V Gigabit networking controller. Finishing off the rear panel is a DisplayPort and HDMI 1.4b pairing of video outputs, as well as a handy PS/2 keyboard and mouse combo port.
The ASUS Prime Z390-A has an unknown MSRP as of yet and looks to offer users not looking to spending the additional budget on gaming related feature sets and flashy aesthetics; RGB is included on this model and white panels with RGB sets this system up really well from a design perspective. The native integration of USB 3.1 Gen2 into the Z390 chipset has been used well on this board and it looks to be a popular board for users not looking to use a WI-Fi enabled model.
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Chaitanya - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
That video advert on pages is stupid pain in rear side to say the least when reading through all those pages.Mr Perfect - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
The "How to pick a CPU" video? If you pay close attention to it, it's actually Anandtech content.That being said, they'll probably be fine with you ad-blocking it. Blocking content doesn't affect ad revenue, right? ;)
leexgx - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
I just opened the site in edge now so I could block them as very distracting and annoying (as well as the scam ads between the article and comments section that I have to scroll past )edwpang - Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - link
I tried not to block ads, but I cannot bear the sight of some pictures and videos.imaheadcase - Wednesday, October 10, 2018 - link
I don't understand how anandtech would allow the scam ads to appear on here, its prob the #1 reason i use a adblock in the first place. The only reason i know about it is from phone, when i first saw them i was like "wtf is this shit".I guess anandtech doesn't think its ads reflect its site.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
If you guys are encountering issues with the ads, please reach out to me and let me know. Ads fall under a different department in Future, but if there are specific problems then I can at least pass those along to get them addressed.Ananke - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
The ads /the video/ are super annoying - its the same style as Tom's Hardware, apparently as business has been merged. The slotted video, or the minimized video screen upon changing the tab size for example makes me avoiding Anandtech and Tom's alltogether, after reading it for 20 years /yeah, since Anand was a teenager and started it as a blog/. I am multitasking, and I can't read when screen is smaller, and I use smaller screen at work, because you know, I work.hoohoo - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
Hi Ryan,The Choose a CPU video is auto-play. On a phone or mobile device this is obnoxious for two reasons: (1) it uses a lot of bandwidth and mobile plans usually have a cap on data above which the reader must pay extra; (2) when the video plays it either pauses any already playing media (mp3 player on the phone) or just plays in addition to the existing media, both are irritating.
Please explain to your ad people that auto-play video is not nice.
Valantar - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
It's likely the camera/render angle playing tricks on me, but the VRM heatsink/rear I/O shroud on the ROG Strix Z390-I Gaming looks like it'll interfere with GPUs with backplates ...The Chill Blueberry - Monday, October 8, 2018 - link
It's most likely just the camera angle. see how the top of the rear I/O is sticking out over the board. A big company like Asus couldn't forget about such an important detail.