BIOSTAR Z590GTA Overview
The BIOSTAR Z590GTA is an ATX motherboard and is part of BIOSTAR’s Racing line of motherboards, which sit right below their highest-end Valkyrie boards. The board itself has a pretty sleek look to it with an all black PCB with blue and grey styling across the board. I was actually pretty surprised at how good the board looked out of the box.
Starting at the CPU socket we have Intel’s LGA1200 socket. Z590 motherboards will support both 10th and 11th generation Intel core processors. This board will feature a 14 phase power design. Cooling down the power delivery components are two heatsinks, both of which have active cooling fans. There are two on the top heatsink and a single fan embedded in the longer heatsink.
The rear I/O is covered with a section that sort of brings the whole top part of the board together. It will light up with RGB lighting when you power your system on. At the top corner of the board you’ll find your 8-pin EPS connector as well as an optional 4-pin.
Moving over to the opposite side of the board you’ll find y our CPU fan header and optional CPU fan header. The main header is black, while the optional header is grey. On this side of the board is where you’ll find y our DDR4 DIMM slots. This board will support memory up to DDR4-5000 (OC) and there are no bottom locks on the slots which make swapping out your memory once you have a graphics card installed much easier.
Coming to the edge of the board you’ll find a 4-pin standard RGB header, two 3-pin addressable RGB headers, 24-pin ATX power connection and a USB 3.2 gen 1 header. As we come down the board there are six SATA 6GB/s ports.
At the bottom of the board you’ll find the rest of your headers and connections. From left to right you have your HD audio header, three 4-pin fan headers, Thunderbolt header, COM port header, two USB 2.0 headers, front panel headers, TPM header, clear CMOS jumper, and a speaker header.
The bottom half of the board is characterized by heatsinks. There are four total heatsinks, three cover the M.2 slots and one of course covers the chipset. The chipset heatsink actually has a mirror-like finish on it, which will light up with RGB lighting.
Removing the heatsinks we can see that we have three M.2 slots. The top slot is the Gen4 slot. There is also a fourth M.2 slot (E key) which is for an optional WiFi & Bluetooth module which is not included. Each of the heatsinks has pre-applied thermal tape.
Most of the audio section of the board is covered, but we can see the audio capacitors. BIOSTAR is making us of the Realtek ALC1220 codec.
Finally we come to the rear I/O which has an integrated I/O shield. As far as connections go from left to right you have DisplayPort, HDMI, WiFi antenna connections, DVI, PS/2, two USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.1 gen 2×2 port (Type-C), three USB 3.2 gen 1 ports, two USB 3.2 gen 2 ports, 2.5G LAN and your audio connections. You’ll notice that audio is limited to only 3 jacks. The 2.5G LAN is powered by the Realtek RTL8125B controller.
