Intel Z490 – Page 3 – Motherboard Review

GIGABYTE Z490 AORUS MASTER

January 7, 2021 by Stephen

The GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master is a very capable board for overclocking with its solid 14-phase power delivery for the CPU. It uses premium 90 A power stages, with adequate VRM cooling, which we saw in our thermal testing. The GIGABYTE performs better in this regard than most Z490 models we’ve tested, and when it came to testing the overclocks, we saw very tight VDroop control. There are plenty of potentials to unlock with the Z490 Aorus Master, not just for the CPU but also in memory, with official support for DDR4-5000 memory.

MSI MEG Z490 UNIFY

January 6, 2021 by Stephen

The MEG Z490 Unify, built around the LGA1200 socket and Intel’s Z490 chipset for its mainstream desktop CPUs, features an almost entirely black color scheme, with the only traces of contrasting color coming from capacitors and power phases on the board and the steel-reinforced PCI Express slots. If you’ve looked at motherboards over the last few years, it may come off a bit flat for your tastes.

BIOSTAR Racing Z490GTN

January 6, 2021 by Stephen

Biostar is a familiar brand in the lower end of the price segment for Mini-ITX boards. The Racing Z490GTN is the company’s answer for anyone looking to build a compact system with 10th and 11th Gen Intel processors. It makes good use of Intel’s Z490 chipset, though you will notice some omissions compared to premium full-sized boards.
The Racing Z490GTN came in at $200 at launch, though you can easily find one for much less. The price is a little high even though it rocks the Z490 chipset. It’s possible to find a Mini-ITX for a little less if you are on a strict budget and don’t mind slightly downgrading to the Intel B460 chipset.

NZXT N7 Z490

January 6, 2021 by Stephen

The NZXT N7 Z490 is based on Intel’s Z490 Express chipset and supports all current LGA 1200 (10th generation) Intel CPU’s. It utilizes a 4-layer PCB and sports a 10-phase power design which we’ll talk about shortly. The motherboard is somewhat stripped feature-wise. That being said, it does offer a couple of things such as 2.5GbE LAN and WiFi 6 support.

ASUS ROG MAXIMUS XII EXTREME

January 6, 2021January 1, 2021 by Stephen

The ASUS ROG Maximus XII Extreme features a robust VRM cooling solution complete with an optional active cooling fan, all paired with no less than sixteen 90 A power stages from Infineon. Dual BIOS with BIOS flashback has also been included, as well as ASUS’s excellent BIOS designed to provide an optimal, stress-free overclocking experience. The ASUS ROG Maximus XII Extreme also offers great connectivity with not only WiFi 6 and 2.5 Gb/s LAN, but also 10 Gb/s Ethernet using an Aquantia controller.

ASUS TUF GAMING Z490-PLUS (WI-FI)

December 22, 2020 by Stephen

Over the past few years, the ASUS TUF hardware series has undergone metamorphoses, like, perhaps, no other series of motherboards from any other motherboard manufacturer. Initially, The Ultimate Force is a series positioned as ultra-reliable and not too far behind the top Republic of Gamers. Well-worn radiators, a special approach to the quality of elements, often full protection of the PCB with a casing and plugs for all slots, a paper certificate of passing all tests according to the military standard for each copy – that’s what I understand.

NZXT N7 Z490

December 22, 2020 by Stephen

Intel platforms have almost become a niche as AMD has stolen a lot of market share over the last few years. NZXT combats this with a fantastic looking motherboard, complete with thermal armor available in black and white colorways. On past solutions, we did note NZXT offered special edition motherboard plates, so we hope to see some of those come over to the Z490 platform as well.

The move to ASRock as the manufacturer has increased the build quality of the NZXT motherboard platform as a whole, the biggest difference coming in BIOS/EFI where we now have a legit solution for overclocking.

SuperMicro SuperO C9Z490-PGW

December 22, 2020 by Stephen

Supermicro is one of the most recognizable brands in the server and workstation market. Still, as we saw in our review of the C9Z390-PGW, Supermicro is consistently injecting its ‘server’ grade DNA into its desktop models. The difference between Z390 and Z490 isn’t as stark as it could be, with the main attribute coming in the way of networking support, with an integrated Wi-Fi 6 MAC, which allows users to utilize CNVi modules.

MSI MEG Z490 Unify, Core i9-10900K & RTX 3080/3090 SUPRIM X

December 16, 2020 by Stephen

I was quite impressed with the entire MSI Z490 Unify + Intel Core i9-10900K setup, but most of all with the all-MSI system. In what started out with just the motherboard, turned into a full MSI system that I will continue to use for articles on 8K gaming battles against AMD’s just-released Zen 3-powered Ryzen 9 5900X processor.

MSI’s entire system ran nice and cool throughout my weeks of testing, with enough (but quiet) airflow keeping the very hot components (the Core i9-10900K isn’t a cool-running chip) and neither are the GeForce RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards when they’re overclocked to the max.

ASRock adds Clever Access Memory to Intel Z490 Motherboards

December 4, 2020 by Stephen

ASRock today released a new Beta BIOS for the Z490 Taichi motherboard which adds support for a technology that enabled the processor to access the graphics card’s full video memory. The technology called Clever Access Memory appears to be ASRock’s marketing name for the same technology that was introduced by AMD for its 500-series motherboards – Smart Access Memory.

The technology is only available to AMD graphics cards, as only those can currently take advantage of a wider Base Address Registry (BAR) through DirectX and GPU drivers. NVIDIA is expected to introduce support for Resizable BAR in the future.