Choosing a Z390 Motherboard Help

[Willy Brown]

Looking to upgrade my pc and unsure of which motherboard to pair with i7/ i9. Have read a few of good reviews of the Gigabyte Z390 AORUS Pro, but to be honest some of the info goes straight over my head. The conclusion from the last review:

If you choose to make the Gigabyte Z390 AORUS Pro WiFi or any Gigabyte board for that matter in the Z390 lineup the platform for your Z390 build there are a few things you must know.

• The Intel spec (ICCmax, Turbo duration, etc) are not followed so your chip will always be at 4.7GHz+
• If you want to disable MCE to get intel stock operation you cant, same activity as above
• If you choose to enable MCE (Advanced Turbo) you will be met by 5GHz solid all core which is awesome
  • Until you run an AVX load or any heavy load.
  • I will have very high temps and VCORE.
  • This issue may be exacerbated with a lower quality chip than mine and I will follow up as soon as possible to confirm this.
  • It may also be less prevalent in a better lower VID chip, once again I will test as I can to see if it follows suit.
• Power draw overall will be a bit higher
• Ring ratio will be higher than other boards at default (4.7GHz vs 4.3GHz)

Is this an end all tell all bad situation? Absolutely not but it is my job to inform potential buyers when I see something amiss. This definitely qualifies as strange in my book.

Is this good or bad lol?

Looking at buying another overlooked bundle from Scan (5ghz i7, 4.9ghz i9)with aio water cooling and running with RTX2080ti

Full review https://www.bjorn3d.com/2018/11/gigabyte-z390-aorus-pro-wifi-review/

 

[RobertR1]

I have this exact board with a 9900k.

- Bios is notable behind Asus
- VRM's are great but if your goal is only 5ghz then any Z390 boards that's north of $220 will do
- Memory overclocking is poor. My xmp 4000mhz b-die kits needs to run at 3600mhz and I had to manually set timings as the default timings are trash
- *DO NOT* let the system set auto voltage. You'll need to go in and set your vcore or it'll spike to ridiculous levels. You were warned
- Don't rely on any auto overclocking. Read the OC guide and follow it
- Ring ratio means very little to nothing

Would I buy it again? no. Am I going to sell it and get something else? No. Time has been invested to make it work so I'll ride it out. If I had an option for refund, I'd get an Asus Z390 Hero or Gene if I really wanted to push the OC on CPU and Mem.

 

[Deleted member 197115]

Just get ASUS.

 

[Turk]

I got the aorus Ultra, I haven't tried overclocking it yet, it's on my to do list. I was specing out for a VR system and it has shed loads of USB 3 ports.

I'm not really knowledgeable enough to review the board. It works fine but I've seen some complaints about it's OC ability. I'm going to stick with it, like I said I'm not an expert on these things so I'm probably not going to notice the difference. The ASUS board I had before seemed to make OC much easier. Which is partly why I haven't attempted an over clock yet.

The consensus seem to be with the ASUS boards. Probably best to go that way.