Review: Asus ROG Strix Z390-I Gaming

by Tarinder Sandhu on 12 November 2018, 15:01

Tags: ASUSTeK (TPE:2357)

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Conclusion

Performance is also very solid and overclocking is as good as a full-size, premium ATX.

Increasing chipset integration and moving away from multi-GPU usage brings smaller motherboards into focus.

Asus has historically had solid support in this area, particularly mini-ITX, and carries on the good work with the Z390-I Gaming.

All the goodies you would expect for £200 board are there, including subtle RGB lighting, pre-installed I/O shield, decent audio and wireless, and, now, a tweaked BIOS offering 'AI overclocking'. Performance is also very solid and overclocking is as good as a full-size, premium ATX.

There's nothing obviously wrong with the board, but we're not fans of the front-panel/USB 2.0 header pins located above the PCIe x16 slot - such design makes little sense. And the auto-overclocking by default isn't good; we'd much rather Asus stick to prescribed Intel turbo ratios.

All said and done, Asus shows that Z390 is as ripe for the mini-ITX treatment as any other chipset. Now priced some £30 more than the Z370 variant, it's a safe buy for anyone looking for a fully-featured solution.

The Good
  
The Bad
Solid performance
RGB restrained and elegant
Good overclocking potential
Lovely I/O shield

  
Weird location for front panel
BIOS overclocks CPU by default


HEXUS.where2buy*

The Asus ROG Strix Z390-I Gaming is motherboard is available to purchase from Scan Computers.


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HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Posted by philehidiot - Mon 12 Nov 2018 15:53
The turbo behaviour can possibly be explained by the Tau variable which dictates how long the CPU can stay in a particular power level. This variable is a timer and acts independently of the CPU temperature to limit how long the CPU can stay in turbo. The reason being that Intel don't want you reducing the life of the chips (so they say, but surely if its adequately cooled it doesn't matter?) but also they don't want you going out and buying a decent cooler, running in turbo mode all the time and essentially going up the product hierarchy for “free”. When turbo hits, it increases clockpeed, the Tau timer expires, speed drops and it allows the currently workload to finish, gives it a few minutes and then allows turbo again.

To allow OEMs integrating into SFF, etc to change the behaviour of the turbo to fit their cooling apparatus, this variable can be changed by OEMs or motherboard manufacturers who can set it at something stupid (which basically says turbo all day long if you like) to boost their benchmarks. It is likely that the Asus board uses the Intel recommended settings whereas the other boards basically eliminate Tau and use only thermal regulation.

This is from a recent article on Anandtech explaining why Intel's specified TDPs are not representative of actual TDP.
Posted by edmundhonda - Mon 12 Nov 2018 18:04
As above: the ~4.1ghz all-core is about where the 9900K runs when the 95W TDP is enforced (PL1). The board is running precisely to Intel's spec when it does that!

In case you haven't joined the dots, this is why those ‘bang4watt’ graphs are misleading.
Posted by =assassin= - Mon 12 Nov 2018 23:28
We also like the way in which modern boards now come with integrated shields

Me too! I really am glad that more and more boards are being available with this feature, since I often find the I/O shields a pain, with them popping out just as I've lined everything up.