Biostar Racing Z490GTN Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

Up until this point, we have not had any indication that this is a mini-ITX board. Normally, companies will put an I somewhere in the product name to let us know that the product is mini-ITX but for some reason, Biostar has chosen not to do so. While this isn’t a major issue, it just means users looking at this board will need to be a bit more careful about looking at the form factor before they purchase it. Having a quick peek around the board and we can see it has most of the features we would need from a Z490 board, even in an ITX size.

One of the first ports I noticed was the HYBRID_CNVI in the top left corner. This port is going to let us install an M.2 2230 WiFi module so we will be able to make use of WiFi 6 on the Z490GTN board. Note, this is not included with the board and is something you will need to purchase separately if you want to use it.

We have a standard 8-pin EPS CPU power connector on the top left-hand side of the board. As this is an m-ITX board, it’s not really meant for mass amounts of overclocking so the need for extra power is non-existent. However, you will still be able to mildly overclock your CPU when using this board.

Over to the right and we have out CPU_FAN and CPU_OPT headers so we can install two fans onto our CPU cooler. We can also see our 5V ARGB and 12V RGB connectors so you can make the most of any RGB products you may want to put in your build.

Working our way down the board and I turned the image a bit so it’s easier to see. We have our 24-pin power connector, four SATA3 connectors, a single USB3.2 Gen 1 header and we can even get a small glimpse of the front panel connector which will be used to connect the power/reset buttons on your case.

The fun continues on down to the bottom half of the motherboard. As this is an m-ITX board, Biostar has had to cram a lot of stuff into a small space without overdoing it. I feel they have done a good job with this, plenty of ports are available all over the board and should be most of what you would need for your build.

The PCIEX16 slot is Gen3 capable with a maximum bandwidth of up to 16GB/s. It also has a bit of reinforcement which Biostar have called ‘Iron Slot Protection.’ This is going to make the slot a bit stronger so, in theory, it won’t bend when using heavier GPUs.

We see this a lot on m-ITX boards where the battery isn’t actually connected to the board but rather to a cable that plugs into the board. This saves space and allows the batter to be hidden almost anywhere it will fit. In the below pic, we can also see a front USB header, fan header and out clear CMOS jumper. Simply touch the two pins on the CMOS jumper with something metal, wait 5 seconds and your CMOS should have reset. This comes in handy should you mess something up in BIOS, for instance, a bad overclock on a component. Simply reset the CMOS and try again!

The rear IO consists of most of the normal connectors we would hope to see. We have a single PS” peripheral port, two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and VGA ports, Lan port, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports and three audio ports.

Normally there isn’t much going on around the backside of the motherboard. However, as this is an m-ITX board, Biostar had added a single port on the back of their Z490GTN.

The port is an M.2 2280 that supports both SATA III 6.0 Gb/s drives and PCIe Gen3 32Gb/s NVMe and AHCI SSD. The only issue with having the M.2 slot on the back is that if your drive has a heatsink on it, it may interfere with the motherboard tray. This means you will want to look into this and make sure your drive will fit into your own system.