January 12, 2021 We have more information regarding ASUS and MSI’s motherboards.
With CES 2021 upon us, we’re seeing announcements and leaks from multiple manufacturers of the best gaming motherboards concerning the latest boards rocking the Z590 chipset with out-of-the-box Rocket Lake-S support. The previous Z490 boards will still be compatible with Intel’s soon-to-be-released 11th gen CPUs through a BIOS update as the new chips still use the LGA 1200 socket, but only a select few of those boards come with PCIe 4.0 support – a standout feature of Intel’s new chips, with team red having already had access to the best SSDs for gaming with double the bandwidth for quite some time.
Gigabyte has announced its two new Z590 Aorus motherboards in a press release, with the Aorus Extreme board unsurprisingly being its top end board. It’s got a pretty similar design to the equivalent Z490 board, but with 21 power phases instead of the previous boards 17, this should help you overclock your CPU to an even higher speed while maintaining stability.
MSI has also teased its Intel 500 series motherboards, with the Z590 “Godlike” looking the most impressive with its black and silver shrouding covering almost all the motherboard, and what looks like RGB lighting.
There are two other Z590 boards from MSI on the way: the “Tomahawk Wi-Fi” and the “Gaming Carbon Wi-Fi”. MSI has not released any specs on the boards yet although we can expect more from their CES event on January 13. According to VideoCardz, it looks like its “Godlike” board has 20 power phases, which is more than its previous boards, like with Gigabyte, also allowing for greater overclocking. MSI also state that the boards will be available for purchase from 27 January.
And, finally, ASUS have announced their upcoming Z590 motherboards, with the highest-end board being the Asus ROG Maximus XIII Extreme Glacial, pictured above. This is covered in white shrouding with a preinstalled water block to connect a radiator to – no air cooling here. The 18+2 power phase plus mandatory water cooling should make it a pretty impressive board for extreme overclocking, and there’s four Thunderbolt 4 USB Type-C ports on the rear for 40Gb/s connectivity. There’s also the slightly cheaper Maximus XIII Extreme, minus the “Glacial” heatsink or watercooling block, with the same PCB layout and features.
If you’re not looking to splash hundreds on an next generation motherboard, ASUS have some more affordable options too, with their TUF Gaming Z590-Plus, which still gives you that PCIe 4.0 and Rocket Lake-S support.
Intel is expected to officially announce the 500-series motherboards at CES 2021, and we’ll see boards from more motherboard manufacturers cropping up in the next week – ahead of Intel’s 11th gen CPU release.