The MSIÂ Z490 motherboards lineup was leaked earlier this week but with very limited information regarding the design and features of the Z490 chipset. Many of us are expecting a PCIe 4.0 upgrade on the new chipset and the renowned leaksters over at videocardz.com have just confirmed that today in their latest Gigabyte Z490 leaks.
Videocardz reported that Gigabyte has confirmed that their motherboards will be compatible with PCIe 4.0 devices, presumably the PCIe Gen4 SSDs and Radeon RX 5000 series graphics card, but with limited functionality. Not much information on the limited functionality was provided in the report but it appears that we might be able to see the rumored Intel Rocket Lake-S after the Comet Lake-S launch later this year.
The report also highlighted the PCIe 4.0 hardware design on Gigabyte motherboards, which will be featured on a list of Gigabyte and AORUS motherboards, as well as a new addition of Vision series that is targeted at the content creators. We’re not entirely sure what happened to the Designare series but we’re guessing that Gigabyte might be shifting its focus to the new Vision series? Based on the image from Benchlife.info, we can see that the packaging for the Vision G motherboard feels almost like the Designare DDR4 memory which was announced back in February this year.
- 2x PCIe 4.0 Slot (Reinforced PCIe 4.0 x16 or x8/x8 with lower impedance)
- M.2 PCIe 4.0 Slot (M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 slot with lower impedance)
- PCIe 4.0 Turbo B-Clock (External clock generator for PCIe 4.0 overclocking)
- PCIe 4.0 Switches (Switch PCIe 4.0 x16 into PCIe x8/x8)
- PCIe 4.0 Re-driver (Boost & strengthen PCIe 4.0 signals to longer lengths)
- 3.3x Slot Signal Stability
- 4x Lower Low Signal Loss PC
Not much information was provided regarding the power design of these Z490 motherboards and we can barely tell the design from the leaked images of the upcoming AORUS Z490 motherboards, but we can somewhat expect to see the use of 90A power stages on the enthusiast-grade Z490 AORUS XTREME WaterForce, Z490 AORUS XTREME, and Z490 AORUS MASTER.
Power design aside, it appears that all the Z490 motherboards from Gigabyte will support a single 32GB module and all of the AORUS lineups will be featuring a Daisy Chain memory layout instead of the T-Topology which they’ve used on the previous Z390 motherboards. With that being said, we can expect to see a vast improvement in memory overclocking on the Z490 AORUS motherboards.
Source: Videocardz, BenchLife
