Home / Tech News / Featured Tech News / Intel Z490 Preview – First look at the motherboards!

Intel Z490 Preview – First look at the motherboards!

MSI MPG Z490 Gaming Carbon WiFi

Estimated Price £250

Key Features

  • Form factor ATX
  • CPU VRMs 12x60A
  • Memory support 4800MHz (OC)
  • Graphics PCI Express 2x PCI 3.0 x16 or x8/x8 with SLI and CrossFireX
  • M.2 slots x2
  • USB:
    • 5x USB 3.2 Gen 2
    • 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1
    • 6x USB 2.0
  • Ethernet Realtek 2.5Gb
  • Wi-Fi Intel 2×2 Wi-Fi 6
  • ‘PCIe Gen4 Ready.'

MSI MEG Z490 Godlike

Estimated Price £700

  • Key Features
  • Form factor E-ATX
  • CPU VRMs 16x90A
  • Memory support 5000MHz (OC)
  • Graphics PCI Express 2x PCI 3.0 x16 or x8/x8 with SLI and CrossFireX.
  • M.2 slots x3
  • USB:
    • 5x USB 3.2 Gen 2
    • 8x USB 3.2 Gen 1
    • 6x USB 2.0
  • Ethernet Aquantia 10Gb+ Realtek 2.5Gb
  • Wi-Fi Intel 2×2 Wi-Fi 6
  • ‘PCIe Gen4 Ready.'

Closing Thoughts

Intel's latest refresh of its Coffee Lake architecture has pushed their desktop platform to a new LGA1200 socket that supports up to ten cores and 20 threads. This is clearly a long way shy of AMD's mighty 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X yet the motherboard manufacturers have gone hell-for-leather with Z490 with their choice of VRM hardware. Mid-range Z490 motherboards sport 10x50A stages while the high end models  go to the limit with 16x90A. We have not yet tested Core i9-10900K but based on the showing of these motherboards we anticipate a significant amount of power and heat. Hopefully that will be matched with a suitable level of performance.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru Says: We will be reviewing Intel 10th Gen in the near future so hold on to your hats as it might get stormy!

Become a Patron!

Check Also

Intel’s Xe3 GPU architecture is already complete, successor already in the works

In a recent podcast interview, Arc Graphics leader and Intel Fellow Tom Petersen revealed some …