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
Supermicro C9Z390-CG
The Supermicro C9Z390-CG and the more expensive C9Z390-CGW seemingly have the same PCB layout which could indicate that both PCB boards are identical in terms of specification, but with this model having less in the way of controllers etc. Aesthetically the CG drops the use of a rear panel cover with metallic grey power delivery heatsinks and a black/grey chipset heatsink. The other key difference is that the C9Z390-CG completely drops RGB support with no integrated LEDs or headers onboard at all. On the storage side of things, the C9Z390-CG has two PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots and also includes a total of six SATA ports.
The C9Z390-CG has a total of four RAM slots with support for DDR4-3866 and up to 64 GB in total. On the PCIe front, the board has two full-length PCIe 3.0 slots which operate at ether x16/x4 with the bottom PCIe 3.0 x4 slot populated at the bottom and/or x16/x8 and the bottom slot is disabled when the second full-slot is in use. Separate to the these is a total of three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots.
Compared to the more feature-rich and more expensive C9Z390-CGW (on the previous page), the C9Z390-CG has the same layout minus one of the dual LAN and instead opts for a single Intel I219V Gigabit LAN. The USB ports included on the rear panel consist of three USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A, one USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C and two USB 3.0 Type-A ports. The onboard audio which consists of five 3.5 mm audio jacks and an optical S/PDIF output is controlled by a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec and the C9Z390-CG also has a trio of video outputs with two DisplayPort 1.2 and a single HDMI 1.4 port.
The Supermicro C9Z390-CG pricing as it stands is currently unavailable. The target market is gamers on a budget and offers a more cost-effective and solid feature set without passing the cost of flashy RGB and unnessacary visually pleasing covers with the primary focus being on the performance.
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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.