Intel Details Their Upcoming Z390 Chipset

Intel has released a product brief of their upcoming Z390 Express chipset, which will sit above the Z370 Express chipset. This new chipset will support current 8th generation Core “Coffee Lake” processors, and will be ready for the next generation of processors as well. Z390 supports LGA1151 processors over a DMI 3.0 chipset bus and has a very similar feature-set to Z370 with 24 downstream PCI-Express 3.0 lanes, six SATA 6 Gbps ports with ACHI and RAID support, as well as up to three 32 Gbps M.2 / U.2 connectors.

Intel Z390 Chipset

So no on to what is different from the Z370 chipset, Z390 will put out six 10 Gbps USB 3.1 gen 2 ports, and ten 5 Gbps USB 3.1 gen 1 ports. On top of that you get fourteen USB 2.0 ports, so a total of 30 USB ports!

Another new thing is Intel’s SmartSound technology, which is described as an “audio/voice offload” DSP. It should reduce CPU load when processing an audio track.

Intel will also be updating the platforms networking. The chipset will support 1 GbE MAC interface, and recommends motherboard manufacturers to include an Intel Wireless-AC 9560 card, with 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5. So pretty much every Z390 motherboard will feature wireless networking, and most of them will include Intel’s recommended WLAN card pairing.

Sadly, there is no details on any new overclocking features that might be added to the chipset.

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