MSI Z390-A PRO LGA1151 (Intel 8th and 9th Gen) review

MSI Z390-A PRO LGA1151 (Intel 8th and 9th Gen) review

MSI Z390-A PRO LGA1151 (Intel 8th and 9th Gen) review

SPECS OVERVIEW
Model Z390-A PRO
Socket LGA1151
Form factor ATX
Chipset Intel Z390
Supported Memory DDR4:
2133Mhz 2400Mhz 2666Mhz 2800Mhz 3000Mhz 3200Mhz 3300Mhz 3333Mhz 3400Mhz 3466Mhz 3600Mhz 3733Mhz 3866Mhz 4000Mhz 4133Mhz 4200Mhz 4266Mhz 4400Mhz* High clock speeds may require enabling the XMP profile in the motherboard BIOS
** Memory compatibility support depends on the CPU memory controller
ECC RAM Support
Audio Chipset Realtek ALC892
Audio Channels 7.1 Channels
LAN Chipset Intel I219-V
Max LAN Speed 10/100/1000Mbps
SLI Support
CrossFire Support
RAID Support
Onboard USB 3.0
Wireless LAN
SATA 3 Gbps Ports 0
SATA 6 Gbps Ports 6
SATA Express Ports 0
M.2 Ports 2
mSATA Slots 0
RAM Slots 4
Maximum Supported RAM 64GB

I've got an msi at 398 pro here so this is a newer version of an another motherboard that I've reviewed well it must have been a year or two ago now I think I last looked at the z170 version of this board I believe and this is the nice shiny new one so it's kind of nice to get a new one because I a lot of people liked the look of the old version of this because this is the quote-unquote anti gamer motherboard because finding high-performance motherboards that don't

have all the lights and the glitz and the glam on them is surprisingly tricky these days now personally I like it I like a bit of RGB on my computers I like it when they light up that's my cup of tea but it's not everyone's cup of tea and I can respect that and so if you want a motherboard that doesn't light up like a Christmas tree then actually this is the kind of thing that you probably want let's take a look at it okay let's go on a tour around the board so there's

less to see on this one because we don't have lots of the fancy LED lighting on this and that's more or less where I'm going to start as you can see it's a very professional looking board here we've talked just a plain brown PCB with just black components on it and there's no LED lighting on this whatsoever unless there's some secret ones that I have been able to spot the audio separation strip doesn't light up or anything although interestingly it does have a single

RGB header down here it's an analog RGB header and that is controllable from the board and from software so if you wanted to you could put this in a case and just have like a single LED strip just providing like a white ambient light or something like that so if you want something that is if you want something that is just illuminated but not garish like a gaming board then this can actually do that if you want to but if you don't plug anything in there then there's no

lights on it whatsoever and so very slick looking board the ERM heatsink up here looks really good this whole thing is one single piece of aluminium there's a lot of machining that went into making that or it might be it might be extruded and they're machined actually I'm not sure anyway the point is this whole thing is aluminium there's no plastic there at all which is quite a welcome relief although of course the size of it is quite overkill but whatever it looks very nice

though no extra heatsink up here for on the auxilary VRMs but that's not the end of the world v core itself comes from a five plus one face setup which does use face doubling so it's an okay setup is not high-end but is not garbage either you can drop in basically any cpu new one and it's going to be absolutely fine this isn't a motherboard for crazy overclocking with but you know you'll be able to dial in a modest overclock if you just want to get a little bit more for your money it'll handle that just fine and of course would be big heat sink on top you're not gonna

need to worry about everything going up in flames and moving around we've got four ddr4 slots they latch up both ends they're not reinforced slots but that's okay I'm happy I'm happy with those as they are we've got two PCI Express 16 length lanes and obviously the sixteen x slot is reinforced in a proper sixteen time slot the second one is 8 times 8 x pins 16 lanes long 8 pins long and that is semi reinforced it's got some staples in it so that is gonna be fairly tough as well I believe you can crossfire I don't however you cannot sli yeah you can crossfire but you

cannot sli on this board we've also got lots of extra PCI Express one time slots and so those are quite nice this is a good one this is a good motherboard if you have lots of auxilary cards in so if you've got you know sound card Wi-Fi card video capture card you know various other things that you might have on here and there's lots and lots of expansion slots on this board so very good on that front the audio is rather lacking we've got a token gesture and Realtek HD audio down here with you know four four - caps on it whatever fine if you're serious about audio

you're going to want to run something else on this run because there's not much going on down there although of course it's debatable how much of a difference it makes I'm personally of the opinion that you need to spend a lot of money on your speakers and amplifier before you will actually care about your audio circuit because most people are unaware stuff and won't actually know the difference between this sound card and a top-end sound card but I digress in terms of other connectivity we've got proper Intel and network on here properly Intel Gigabit

Ethernet so that will just work straight out to the box with Windows 10 no drivers no software required very nice lots of additional connectors for TPM front audios down there of course and we've also got extra spine headers and things like that down here dual USB to front headers so you've got a lot of USB to internal peripherals you can hook those up or if you just simply want lots of USB rear paws can hook those up and that is actually relevant and I'll get to that in a

moment we've also got the LP T port there as well so you can hook up legacy connectors to this as well we've got lots and lots of fan headers we got two system fan headers down here we've got another two up here and we have two CPU headers here one of them labeled CPU one of them labeled pump so good for water cooling or just for twin fan stuff there and oh yeah we've also got the front the rear fan headed there as well so we've actually got seven fan headers in

total curiously we also have a PCI Express six pin power connector just there and I don't know why that's there actually I did actually look around I read through the manual I looked on the website I'm not sure why that's there the only reason I can think of is if you're running is very specific graphics cards that are reasonably high-end but just not quite high enough to require a six pin power connector you can just supplement the PCI Express power delivery with that connect to that because the PCI Express 16 slot that can actually knock house sometimes 75

Watts I think and there are some graphics cards that just sit on that power limit and it's like it's not ideal it's kind of like I think that the 1050 is one of those cards where the 1050 and some of the 1050 tea is they can actually be just bus-powered only and they're sitting up at you know 1775 watts it's not really ideal in my opinion so I think that is why they've put that PCI Express connector there just so you can augment a low-end graphics card with some extra power if you

media we've got a single m2 slot no dual m2 slots which is a pity rather than putting in a second m2 slot they've got and the extra card connector over here which is for putting in Wi-Fi cards so I don't know how I feel about that I don't feel a lot I guess you might want onboard Wi-Fi with this but just you know use a PCI Express card you've got lots of those I don't know I I think having 2 m2 slots is more helpful because it means you can chuck in a 500 gig SSD now

and put in another 500 gig SSD later on down the line or a terabyte later on down the line so yeah I don't know how I feel about that and so yeah mixed opinions there but that's what it has that is what is there six out of three ports dual front USB 3 headers however no USB see front header which is a bit disappointing for a Zed 319 board I know there are hardly any cases that actually have front USB 3 yet sorry USB see but that that is also a point of contention you know

USB C is something that really should be embraced but no one is putting the connectors on which means no one's buying the accessories for it and we're kind of in this we're in this core of a lot of the circular logic here we do have a nice debug led though which is nice those are always helpful when you're having issues with the system very easy to add in very very helpful when troubleshooting so that's quite nice let's take a look at the back so on the back we've got surround audio output we've got our intel Gigabit Ethernet and USB 3 headers we've got USB

3.1 combo here so the a and the C connector so you know we've got the token gesture C connector that's okay we've got a nice big DisplayPort connector which is tasty we've got DVID and vga there so there's lots of connection options on the back I can't help but wonder if one of these should be replaced with HDMI because personally I think that there should always be a HDMI port but yeah I don't know it's up to you I guess you can very easily adapt DVI to HDMI

so that's no big deal or you can adapt your display forward to DVI to HDMI if you want so there's there's options there it's fine that's what it has we've got a ps2 port and weirdly another two USB to ports so there's not a huge amount of usb on the back of this thing discounting the C type connector which is not very widely used yet we've only got five USB ports at the back and two of them a USB 2 although again to be honest if you're connecting a lot of USB devices

then some of them are going to be - anyway this is made up for by the fact that we've got those two USB 2 headers so you can add lots of extra ports at the back but I don't know I kind of think I kind of think that something on he should have been replaced with another 2 USB 2 port you know maybe they should have ditched one of the video connectors and put slapped on some extra USB the problem is is extremely circumstantial as to which is more important to you

however I'm not here to judge what I think you need you can look at this and decide for yourself whether it has what you need so that's the overlooked really there's not a huge amount to see there's some very interesting choices on this board for what features it has and doesn't has so yeah let's fire it up and see how how it looks in a build and what the BIOS looks like alright so I've got this board now installed it in a computer it's not a very pretty computer this

is a repair job that this is going into this getting quite a heavier great and as you can see there's no illumination at all so as suspected this board is a no illumination board so if you don't want lights and LEDs this is definitely the board for you so this is all posted up now so we'll switch over to the BIOS screen and we'll just take a quick wander around there let's just turn off the

camera so you can see it all cool right so the default BIOS screen is actually very helpful we've got they keep tweaking this summary screen on modern biases which I'm quite a big fan of so as you can see we've got all the headline figures up here including motherboard CPU memory what current V Corps and DDR core and the bios version there as well we've come with a sort

of late 2018 BIOS on here this is probably the original BIOS actually so we'll have a look at the BIOS update screen see if there's anything interesting there however because this is a Zed 390 chipset we don't need to do any updates to get adding any support on this and so likewise we've got the easy mode here which just shows us quick information for CPU memory storage and so on this is all quite helpful I like all of this actually again it's very similar to what we see in normal biases but just this layout is very intuitive nothing's hidden away everything that you

typically want right in front of you is right in front of you even the fan warning control you can just switch that on and off here directly XMP profiles can also be just turned on and off directly very handy and then if we go into the advanced screen up the top here just click on that we get the more traditional NSI layout here so we can go on to settings and we can start drilling through these areas to all the normal stuff which I'm not going to go through because we've seen it all before on other stuff and the overclocking settings OC explorer mode we've got

normal and expert settings which hide and show certain settings as you need them on normal modes we've got our ratios and what's the offset oh that's interesting okay yeah offsets that's cool ring ratios we've got the base clock there as well so the typical stuff that you'd actually want directly in front of you is all here under normal and that includes voltage settings as well which is nice a big pet hate of mine with them I think it's Giga Byte biases is they tend to put

voltages and frequencies on separate menus which means you have to do a lot of tooing and furring when tweaking things whereas on this one it's all right there on a single menu all the typical stuff that you want to see so I like that quite a lot they've also got this weird drag-and-drop for boot order which I'm not really a fan of this I don't know that just I,it's very cluttered I don't really like this barber ok you know that's all right I guess personally for me I

always say just you know UEFI is always going to be your default at first and if you want anything different spam f11 or f12 to get the boot menu but yeah whatever let's just check what we've got in EM flash so we've got a reef reboot and enter for flash mode let's just have a quick look in here I want to know if it's got an internet flash mode because I really like motherboards that you can flash directly off the internet that's a really neat trick so I'm just going to wait that to reboot and it doesn't it's only it will only update from a USB flash drive so you got to

download your BIOS updates which is a shame you know it's nice when the internet update is there but whatever I'm not gonna mark it down for that that's not something that make that is a make-or-break decision for me on whether I'm gonna buy this particular board so let's have a quick look at the fan setup because that's another thing that I always look for I'm gonna drop into advanced for this and let's go to a hardware monitor so the bit I'm looking for here is

firstly do all of the fan outputs allow for PWM control and they do which is nice you've got full PWM fan control on all five outputs which is good and in addition to that we can specify many temperature sources CPU or system it would be nice if it gave you more options for what temperature sources you could use because for example we've got system but I've no idea where that system if thermal source is for example the fact that we've got at the front of this computer that's over here this fan is very apt at handling a graphics card heat issue because if the

graphics card is getting very warm you want this front fan to ramp up and blow more cold air in toward the lower regions of a case and for example you wouldn't want that front fan to be towed to the CPU because if the CPU is warming up you want this back fan to ramp up and exhaust that hot air out from the CPU so depending on where the fans are depends on what you want them to respond to and we only really have just two options here whereas on for example a gigabyte board it would have a couple of different sensors dotted around the motherboard

and you could select what region you want that fan to respond to but we're getting pedantic here because you know like most of the computers that I set up you know I mean as you guys have probably seen I hardly ever use system fans EDD as it is you just don't need the modern modern computers you know or really they don't make any noticeable difference in my opinion so again that's not deal breakers just an observation but yeah the other nice thing as well as

those system fans it has automatically detected DC control for the system fan I have connected and it's defaulted to seven volts which is a very good standard voltage before a DC fan so that's absolutely fine with me we do also have step up and step down time so that is not these are not big enough to be useful what we really need is proper is proper hysteresis and what that means is it's the interval in which the fan controller will wait before changing the fan speed so if you suddenly get a temperature spike and the fan monitor goes all the temperatures gone up

therefore we need to step the fan up and if we the thing is is that for example on your CPU temperature the CPU temperature come bounce up and down very very rapidly it can change by 10 or 20 degrees in a second and if that is just a burst change you know like you just suddenly you loaded up Google Chrome which took a second to open up so for two seconds your CPU went high temperature and then it dropped down to low temperature again you

don't need the fans to react to that the heatsinks will take care of that that's what the heat sinks are for so what the idea of step up and step down time is how long the fan controller will wait before it actually responds to a change in temperature and in an ideal world we kind of want that to be like a couple of seconds really but these are only go up to 0.7 seconds so that's not really enough to be useful in my opinion although that much being said it probably will filter

out the charismatic the charismatic revving noises that for example i7s can sometimes give your i7 CPU cooler can sometimes sit there going where we are when you're doing things on the desktop because that that's that CPU temperature is bouncing because that's what I sevens do and your heatsink will be absorbing those temperature spikes so you don't need the fan to respond to that so you could just change that up to 0.7 seconds and that might just be enough

just to filter out that revving noise that you sometimes get but it's got it and it's got it on all the fans which is nice as well so it does that include the pump as well yeah it does include the pump incidentally so if you wanted to anyway that sums it up for that so system and mas okay we do have we do have the V core temperature as well and so although I'm not quite sure exactly what this is referring to here because we've got temperature source here and temperature there I
think that's what is being compared to perhaps hmm I'm not sure oh well .

MSI Z390-A PRO LGA1151 (Intel 8th and 9th Gen) review

that particular design they believe it is better so that's something we have to dig into in the future but yeah that's that at the moment a sous have said it was a mistake that it was advertised as an 8 + 2 + 2 phase vrm in the US that was a mistake by the US marketing team so they're now rectifying that and once they do hopefully I can get an official statement for them and I'll pin that on the previous video and that will hopefully put it into that issue and hopefully we don't see any twin 8 phase marketing BS from a sous in the future anyway with the mystery

of the twin 8 phase erm mostly solved we can move on to some more testing and I do plan to test pretty much every single Zed 3 and on your motherboard at least every single one I can get my hands on a few of you have requested we test out the EVGA models unfortunately we don't really get EVGA here in Australia and despite the fact that about 40% of our viewership do come from the u.s. EVGA don't seem that interested in sampling us so maybe we can convince

them in the future but as of now or for now we've only got the four main brands that we're going to be checking out so on hand we have the asrock zed 390 pro 4 this is a model and I have taken all their heat sinks off the boards and have them putting them back or haven't put them back for this part of the review so you're seeing the boards mostly naked doesn't really matter I suppose next up we have actually will go to where we got the MSI board let's go with that as next because that's also so I'll do them in order of price actually

I'm not doing them in order a price scrap that anyway but the msi board next said 390 pro note said 390 a pro that's that board then we got the cheaper sport here the gigabyte Zed 390 UD looks to be one of the better boards of the bunch again no heat sinks on it but yeah seems like a pretty good buy that and then the most expensive of them all the asou prime Z 390 P now a sous well this is an entry-level board they don't seem to do entry-level

you've only got the budget for a core i5 r i3 processor today an affordable Zed 390 board with basic features seems like a reasonable solution and it should mean in a year or two you can pick up a 90 under okay on the sale or secondhand and slot that into your existing is that 390 motherboard this is a fairly common scenario people buy what they can afford now in the hope that they can max it out and upgrade in the future without having to upgrade their entire

system after all the four entry-level motherboards that we're looking at today all officially support the 99er okay so it's not unreasonable to expect that some users might eventually end up using this processor on one of these motherboards question is how well do they support the power-hungry eight core processor before we get to the results let's just quickly go over each board starting with the gigabyte Zed 390 UD this board uses the ISL six nine one three eight

controller and from it five pwm signals are outputted for the vcore these signals are then each doubled using the ISL six six one seven phase doubler giving us ten phases for the high side MOSFETs we have on semiconductors for C ten N and on the low side for C 0 6 n cooling the board's vrm are a pair of reasonably large anodized black aluminum heat sinks that properly finned but they aren't just aluminium blocks either and both are secured to the PCB using

plastic push pin clips next up we have the asrock z3 90 pro 4 and this board uses the up9 5 to 1p phase controller though this time we have just four pwo signals for the vcore though each is again doubled this time using U P 1961 s phase SS giving us eight phases in total as for the MOSFETs on the high side we have so no power SM 4337 and on the low side SM 43:36 so not a bad configuration for a budget board though you do still need to cool at nazarov seems to have forgotten that little factors they've stuck on these smallest heatsink you're likely ever to find on

his m390 motherboard I reckon the Intel IHS would have done a better job of calling these MOSFETs the heatsink weighs in at just 24 grams and that's pretty pathetic considering gigabyte swacked 108 grams worth of heatsink on their entry levels at 390 board next up we have their sous Prime at 0 90 P and things don't look that much better here sure we've got some heat sinks both much bigger and combined tip the scales at 57 grams but the vrm design itself is it's pretty rubbish as usual as sousou's using their rebranded asp 1,400 c TB controller and as

usual at least for the majority of their said 390 range they're taking just four PWM signals and they aren't doubling them so then we have a four phase with a doubling of components like gigabyte they are using on semiconductors 4 C 10 n for the higher side and therefore C 0 6 and for the low side there's just less of them in total and not even half as many phases given that this is by far the most expensive of the entry-level boards just say that I'm disappointed with

what Asus are offering here doesn't really cut it anyway lucky last we have the MSI z3 9 ta Prohm this is a pretty nice looking board on the surface we get a nice big heat sink over the V chord vrm this monster weighs you know 170 grams so it is the biggest heatsink of all the entry levels at 390 motherboards that said the vrm itself isn't super impressive like asrock msi is using the U P 9521 P phase controller and they are also taking just four PWM signals however unlike asrock they aren't doubling them so this is another for phase V core vrm on the high side

we have a pair of SM 4337 FETs on the low side two sm 4503 FETs so it'll be interesting to see how this motherboard performs ok so that's how the boards compare on paper I'm just quickly before we get into the results if you would like to know exactly how I've tested these boards in each configuration please watch the previous video in this series I'll provide a link in the review description it'll probably be a timestamp to where I actually explain how I test on the testbed and inside the case but I won't go over all that here like I said I'll just put the link as it takes me

quite a few minutes to get through all that so we'll skip that and we'll get straight into the results so again if you want to know about that check the link in the video description ok so here are these stock 9900 k results with the board's installed inside the Corsair crystal 570 X with plenty of fans and direct airflow over the vrm all testing has been conducted with an ambient air temperature between 21 and 22 degrees thermals have been measured using k-type thermocouple ZAR measuring the MOSFET surface temperature labeled as top as well as the

underside of the PCB and please note the internal mosfet temperatures are at least 10 degrees higher usually around 20 degrees higher so there is quite a difference there however we don't use the readouts from stuff like hardware info because well some of these boards give you that information and it's not always accurate there's offsets and things like that so it's not a great way of comparing motherboards anyway keeping the internal temperature in mind which will

be higher you really want to keep the surface temperature below 80 to 85 degrees as that would mean an internal temperature around 100 degrees these components are usually rated to handle up to 125 degrees but that's the thermal cutoff and you'll want to stay well away from that efficiency is also very poor at those temperatures you're basically killing the components and well degradation is rapidly accelerated please note there are two test configurations for the gigabyte is Ed 390 UD as this board seems to over volt the 1900 K quite badly with the current

f3 bias that we use for testing despite being the best board on paper with what looks to be the best or close to the best cooling and actually provided the worst results however during the test I noticed the 99 okay was being fed one point three eight volts which is far too much even for a 5 gigahertz all core overclock I have notified gigabyte of this issue and in the meantime I've set the voltage at one point to 6 volts to match the Isuzu Prime the M result though under load was

about 1.2 to 5 volts the MSI asrock boards ran between one point two eight and one point two eight eight volts which is a bit higher but that's what they do on auto anyway we should probably just discuss the results so the lowest peak MOSFET surface temperature was recorded on the MSI Zed 390 a pro and just 52 degrees that said the back side of the PCB hits 75 degrees which is certainly getting up there the reason for the huge variation is due to the fact that MSI boards have a massive heatsink that does a really good job of removing heat from the

surface of the FETs especially when there's plenty of airflow to capture however because the MSI board only uses a four phase veeram the components do generate quite a bit of heat and that's absorbed through the PCB and then isn't dissipated very well and therefore builds up to around 75 degrees the result you see here now the gigabyte Z 390 UD dropped an incredible 20 degrees when running the 1900 K at one point two to five volts opposed to the one point three

eight volts and this 11 percent reduction in voltage has a profound impact on how hot the very gets so while the gigabyte board is a poor performer right now they should be able to address this with a future BIOS and that will make it one of the best although the MOSFET surface temperature was 9 degrees hotter than what we saw in the MSI board the pc temperature was 11 degrees cooler and that is very significant the asustor primes at 390 P does reasonably well in this test with MOSFET surface temperatures climbing just a few degrees higher than the

gigabyte model though the PCB temperature was 10 degrees hotter then we have the asrock Zed 390 pro 4 which quite frankly sucked the vrm design as we saw earlier isn't bad but the tiny little 24 gram heatsink is a complete joke we're seeing surface temperatures around 80 degrees and although this board it doesn't report vrm temperatures I suspect the internal temperature is up around 100 degrees so that's basically a fail in my book we've got a stock 99

Enrique in a well ventilated case in a cool room and the vrm temp using k-type thermocouple is reaching 80 degrees the results you see here are reported after the load test I give the board's 10 minutes to cool down and then I report the current temperature the MSI Zed 390 a pro cools down the best likely thanks to its massive heatsink and we also saw the PC temps came right down as well then with a bit of voltage tuning we set the gigabyte board also comes down to a similar temperature to that of their sous and as ROC models that said stock using the f3 bias

had only cooled down to around 40 degrees okay here are the test bench results with no direct airflow and you might be wondering what all those red bars are about basically these indicate invalid results the MSI asrock and our sous boards all suffered varam throttling which down clocked the 1900 K from 4.7 gigahertz to around 4.2 gigahertz the Isuzu Prime's ed 390 P began throttling after 6 minutes at which point it had already reached a MOSFET surface

temperature of 100 degrees the asrock said 390 pro war began throttling after seven minutes when the surface temperature reached 90 degrees and the MSI's ed 390 a pro throttled after eight minutes hitting just 67 degrees for the surface temperature I left the boards all running for the hour-long test but because we were verum throttling these boards didn't get that much hotter though they did continue to run at dangerously hot temper now the gigabyte Zed 390 UD using either the optimized voltage settings or the auto voltage configuration did manage to

avoid erm throttling that said it probably should have throttled as the 1.38 volt configuration got insanely hot with a MOSFET surface temperature of just over 100 degrees even with the optimized voltage we're still seeing a surface temperature of eighty degrees which is around a hundred degrees for the internal temperature so really all boards technically failed here as the surface temperatures were just getting too high that said the gigabyte Zed 390 UD is right on

the edge and since it didn't throttle and it maintained this surface temperature after the hour long stress test whereas the MSI asrock and a sous boards would have all gone up in smoke I'll give gigabyte a pass on this one ten minutes after running the hour-long load test these are the temperatures we were faced with gigabyte didn't cool down that well though the results are still decent the big heat sink on the MSI Z 390 a pro saw a cool down the most rapidly on the open

air test bench while the asrock and a sous boards also did quite well despite the fact that it was really only the gigabyte board that didn't fail this test miserably normally I also provide a series of overclocking results but given the stock performance I wasn't expecting much from these entry-level boards with the 99er ok at 5 gigahertz as expected the sous asrock and msi boards all failed this test they are the suffered verum throttling issues almost right away or they

crashed completely giving us the blue screen of death the asrock and the swords couldn't maintain the 1.3 volt 5 gigahertz overclock and would crash while the msi board quickly overheated the gigabyte Zed 390 UD did technically pass this test without any verum throttling at all but again with MOSFET surface temperatures of around 80 degrees it's a questionable pass for comparison I have included some higher-end Zed 390 boards that I've already tested

and as you can see there is quite an extreme difference in the vrm quality and idle the gigabyte board did cool down nicely and here it is comparable to the Maximus 11 hero then just to see if I could get the gigabyte z3 9 AUD to verum throttle I tested it on the open air test bed and let it cook surf temperatures hit 101 degrees and highway info was reporting a very intemperate of 126 degrees and yet the board never throttled within 9900 K obviously that's a fail and even the

Maximus 11 hero is borderline too hot in this test as the internal MOSFET temperatures and knocking on the door of 100 degrees impressively even with no airflow the Gigabyte said three Niner UD did cool down to a reasonable temperature after 10 minutes of course it failed the load test but it's good to see when placed under extreme load that it's still able to cool down quite quickly well I think I think it's fair to say that the entry level is at 390 motherboards or a bit of a scam I know that's a harsh way of putting it but I can't for the life of me understand

what the point of these motherboards is the gigabyte ones reasonable but the rest of them yeah I don't get what the point is in my mind the entire point of the Zed 390 was to signify or show that motherboards donning this particular chipset were locked and loaded ready for the 1900 if we look at previous Zed 370 models we see that the bulk of them the lower end models from MSI gigabyte of Zeus asrock they all featured for phase V RMS and most of them will really

struggle have actually done some testing and found they really struggle with the fully unleashed 9900 K which is the out of the box and not the 95 watt TDP limited power limited setup that we have actually tested on the channel anyway and we could take gigabytes range for example of the 370 boards the Auris gaming seven that's probably the only board that should be ok for long-term use rendering and whatnot with the 900k everything else is really going to struggle

and yes certainly wouldn't be an ideal solution for the new 8 core processor so we already have low-end affordable 370 motherboards we don't need low-end affordable Zed 390 motherboards that's not the bloody point of the Zed 390 chipset now I didn't mean to have this motherboard there I actually did I got this board by mistake I was taking a look at this born as well but I can make the comparison that I was going to make anyway so here is the actual MSI board that

I've been meaning to talk about or review but I've been pointing at these air 370 board but this Zed 390 model has the exact same erm so this is the board we tested in the review here's the older version we've got the same for phase V RM this one has a few extra chokes and a bigger heatsink and for that you pay more possibly worth paying more I don't know not really the point because neither of these boards are really capable of taking full advantage of the

ninety nine hundred K and well yeah I suppose those buying a night star okay now looking at buying of these boards but as I said earlier review make it a year down the track you've bought this board to use a core i3 or a Core i5 and now you want to upgrade and you 10th generation Intel stuff probably won't be compatible with this platform so your only option would be to get a 19-hour okay and unfortunately doing that it's going to put the board under a lot of stress

and not get the most out of the 1900 those boards don't need to exist because you can spend well a Susa so hide it you can spend about I think it's only about more and you get a board that's super capable from the gigabyte range got doublers and all that good cooling works really well really high-quality ISL chips in fact it is only gigabyte who took this

opportunity to update their Zed 370 arranged with a fresh new lineup of 390 boards now you could argue that well they were in most need of an upgrade their Zed 370 boards weren't particularly good but it is great to see them correcting that previous mistake with a stellar range of 390 motherboards that said even gigabytes entry-level board and while their entire entry level line up everything priced below is kind of a make-do situation with
the 9900 K .