The Ultimate Z590 Motherboard Guide

Power Delivery

One of the most important upgrades for Z590 is the way each motherboard handles power. To get the best performance out of newer and faster CPUs, more stable and consistent voltages can make a huge difference, especially so when overclocking.

There’s been much debate over the effectiveness of VMR configurations on previous generations of boards. Furthermore, talk of how many Power Stages each brand is using. For Z590, it looks like all the major brands have gone all out, especially so on their enthusiast and flagship-class motherboards.

Of course, even the budget boards have enough to run the top chips from Intel, assuming you leave things at their stock settings, of course. The more over-engineered the motherboard becomes, the more likely it is to be able to sustain sustained loads at higher clock speeds, voltages, and more.

For the most part, every board uses the ISL69269 Controller, except the MSI MEG Z590 GODLIKE (RAA229828, and the MSI Z590 Pro WIFI and A Pro (RT3609BE). How many Power Stages they have is detailed on the following pages, if that information was available to us (mostly, it was).

Z490 Vs Z590

The MSI MEG Z490 GODLIKE was no slouch, but looking back, it had an INTERSIL digital PWM, 16+1+1 phases with 90A Smart Power Stage, while the MEG Z590 GODLIKE steps that up to a Direct 20 Phases, 90A Smart Power Stages design. The Z490 AORUS Xtreme has 16 Phases Digital VRM Solution with 90A Smart Power Stage and Tantalum Polymer Capacitors Array and that now 20+1 Phases Digital VRM for Z590. We see basically the same from all brands.

Active Cooling

However, the VRM heatsinks are (for the most part) not only bigger, but many of them feature one or more active fans to drive even better performance.

Unless you’re ASUS, who’s taken a giant cooler and stuck some motherboard to it, I’m very interested to see what this thing can do!

Mid-Range

This is true on some “mid-range” boards, in quotes as all Z590 boards are effectively the top-end Z490 boards with all the trimmings. The ASRock Z590 Steel Legend WiFi 6E is basically the old board with significantly bigger VRM heatsinks and a 14 Phase Dr.MOS Power Design vs the old 11 Phase design.

“Affordable” Motherboards

Even the more affordable models from BIOSTAR look like serious high-end competitors compared to previous generations. Their old VRM heatsinks were pretty light, but the new ones are much taller, with fins on the Z590GTA Ver. 5.0. It seems then that when it comes to taking the new Intel CPUs to their limits, all of the boards should be capable. Of course, the extreme overclocking potential will vary.