Intel Z390 Chipset Product Brief and Block Diagram posted
Intel on its website has published a page on the Z390 chipset, including a chipset block diagram showing all connections. Z390 will support all Coffee Lake generation desktop processors but would also be compatible for the next-generation.
Z390 has been discussed a lot, it should be a chipset intended for 8-core Coffee Lake CPUs, but these are not expected to launch anytime soon. Z390 will get an LGA1151 socket using the traditional DMI 3.0 chipset-bus (which basically is an x4 PCIe link lane up/downlink. Similar to the Z370 chipset, it'll have 24 PCI-Express gen 3.0 lanes. Also similar is storage at six SATA 6 Gbps ports with AHCI and RAID support; and up to three 32 Gbps M.2/U.2 connectors. LAN remains the same as well. 1 GbE, Intel recommends their Wireless-AC 9560 card for the motherboard manufacturers to pair this chipset with for 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5. Some differences are spotted though, USB is configured at six 10 Gbps USB 3.1 gen 2 ports, ten 5 Gbps USB 3.1 gen 1 ports.
All in all, there are very little changes, other than new CPU support. You can find more info here.
Above Intel Z390
Above (for comparison) Z370
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Senior Member
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I'm really interested to why people need so many PCIE lanes, I mean SLI and crossfire are dead basically. we have m.2 now and SATA SSDs are plenty fast. please help me understand
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I suppose some people use many add on cards like sound and network cards along with 2 GPUs?
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On a side note: from experience, external dacs are way better in terms of quality and comfort than internal audio cards.
OK, that sounds like it is 1% of the PC market maybe even less...maybe if you need several network cards but again that's server territory not consumers
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Well my biggest concern is to have 16+4+4 which will mean that I will be able to add just 2 m.2 drives. I also don't need to add network cards, and I use an external usb sound card.
Sli-wise speaking, yeah for me personally it doesn't really change a lot, but I have a couple of friends that are into video editing and rendering which would be really glad to go for a z390 system instead of paying the premium for the "professional tier" intel has to offer, because they are starting and they have a lot of expenses besides their PCs.
Ofc, you can argue that they can go for ryzen, but considering the RAM prices and how well scales AMD with faster RAMs, the price at the end is almost the same, with a slight advantage in performance for intel CPUs.
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still ddr4 and just 24 pcie lanes, I can't say I'm not disappointed