Z490 Explained!
Intel’s new CPUs are here, and along with them are their Z490 boards. There’s a lot new, so in this video I was to walk you through it all, but first if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every monday, wednesday and friday!
So, Z490 then. As a quick refresher for those who don’t know, the Z is the higher end chipset Intel offers – and it’s main selling point is the ability to overclock using one. 490 is the model of chipset you’ll need if you want to run these 10th gen chips like the 10900K. That’s because Intel decided the socket needed 49 extra pins. It’s now LGA 1200, up from 1151 from last gen.
What’s interesting is that, as far as I know anyway, those extra 49 pins are inactive on the current chips since they plan on using them to double the total number of PCIe pins to get Gen 4 speeds on next gen chips.
What that means though is that the motherboards are built to support PCIe Gen 4 to the 2 PCIe Slots directly connected to the CPU, and with some trickery might even be able to support Gen 4 NVMe drives in an M.2 slot, depending on how your board is configured. It won’t change the chipset connection though, since that’s DMI 3.0 – or PCIe Gen 3. You’ll need a Z590 or something like that to see DMI 4.0.
One other thing you need on these boards is pretty insane power delivery – if you’ve watched the 10900K review, you’ll know that with a modest 5.1GHz overclock, it can draw nearly 300W through the VRMs, and if you can manage to keep it cool enough to run at a higher voltage, it needs well over 300W, so with a board like the MSI Z490 Ace, which has a 16 phase, 90 amp rated VRM setup which is mental, but necessary. Even their lower end boards like the Gaming Edge – which now costs £210 by the way – has a 12 phase setup which is insane and at least at the time of filming, the cheapest Z490 boards are still £140 and they are literally empty barring 12 phase VRMs.
One interesting, but less important change is that on the higher end boards, the ones that normally come with a second ethernet port that’s normally more than gigabit, they are now almost exclusively coming with 2.5Gb/s ports, rather than the 5 or 10 gig we saw last gen. This is kind of a shame, since I can’t imagine it costs motherboards makers much more to go with 10 gig instead, but most people who buy these boards don’t care so not the end of the world. We are seeing WiFi 6 being adopted much more heavily though, which I know some people will be able to benefit from.
The main thing of note about the Z490 boards is that the CPUs that currently fit in them are clearly placeholders. With PCIe Gen 4 support built into the boards, but not the CPUs, it paves a clear path for why not to buy this gen, at least not yet. With that said, if you are going with one, make sure you check out reviews of the motherboard you want to make sure it’s power delivery setup is good enough for the CPU you want too.
