Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X motherboard review

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The Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X is a full sized ATX Desktop Motherboard built by the Taiwanese gaming giant Gigabyte. It uses Intel’s LGA 1200 CPU socket and supports the Intel Core professor series all the way from a Core i3 to a Core i9 from the 10th generation and onwards. It also supports Intel’s 10th generation Pentium and Celeron series of CPU chipsets although it is a requirement that they have an LGA 1200 socket. It’s a powerful motherboard that is packed to the brim with surprises.

Basics:

Starting with the basics, the Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X is built on Intel’s Z490 motherboard chipset with goodies added specially to aid gamers, content creators and anyone that would require the harnessing of high-speed processing power with good power efficiency. This was the highest-end motherboard chipset back when it launched as a complement to their newer, 10th generation Comet Lake–S CPUs. It can also fit 11th generation Intel CPUs. The Gaming X comes with support for Windows 11 as well PCIe 4.0 connectivity.

CPUs:

The Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X offers support for all Intel CPU chipsets made as part of or after their 10th generation of CPUs. This includes regular Core series CPUs as well as newer Pentium and Celeron powered CPUs. Using a Celeron or Pentium CPU on this, however, would be a severe underestimation of its raw power and true potential. Due to the nature of the different architecture used by Intel and AMD to manufacture CPUs as well as having different CPU sockets, it is near impossible to be able to use either one of the CPUs on the same motherboard. The Gaming X does not support AMD CPUs and their connectivity protocols.

RAM:

The Intel Z490 chipset inside of it allows the Gaming X to house up to 128 GBs of DDR4 RAM. It can support up to 2666 MHz for Core i5, i3 and lesser powerful processor series. For Intel’s Core i7 and i9 series, it can support RAM as fast as 2933 MHz with overclocking up to 4600 MHz supported. The motherboard uses a Dual Channel memory system with 4 DIMM slots – each slot maxing out at 32 GB. It also has built-in overclocking for RAM provided that your RAM module is an XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) module.

Storage:

Since the Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X is quite a recent release, it comes with all the latest and greatest of hardware. That is no different matter when it comes to the storage options it provides. The Z490 has 2 M.2 slots with PCIe 3.0 x4 supported to run the fastest NVMe SSDs. It also offers 6 SATA III 6 Gbps connectors for SATA SSDs or regular hard drives. RAID storage is also supported with RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10 fully compatible.

Input and output:

The Z490 Gaming X is no slouch when it comes to I/O. Being a full size ATX board, there is no good reason for Gigabyte to skimp on this section of the board. It supports PCIe 3.0 and has 5 slots to offer. One of these slots is a fully functional PCIEX16 slot. There is one other PCIEX16 slot, however that slot runs at x4. Lastly, we have 3 PCIe x1 slots but, since all these are PCIe 3.0 supported, these slots feel very fast compared to other, regular PCIe slots.

The Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X also houses 8, very fast USB 3.2 ports one of which is USB 3.2 Generation 2 and the rest are USB 3.2 Generation 1. There are also 4 USB 2.0 ports for basic connectivity and any older peripherals. It also houses a whopping 6 3.5mm audio jacks and for video connectivity it also has a dedicated HDMI 1.4 port. For all the old-school tech lovers out there, they will be happy to know that the Z490 does not ditch the traditional PS/2 port for anything newer.

Cooling:

Cooling is arguably one of the most important elements of any desktop setup and the motherboard plays an extremely vital role in this. The Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X has quite a few tricks up its sleeve when it comes to cooling performance and efficiency. Starting off with its proprietary Smart Fan 5 technology which uses 6 internal temperature sensors located at different areas on the motherboard to give the user a detailed analysis of the cooling inside the motherboard. The user can then interchange fan headers, adjust fan speed or control fan noise among other things using the interactive GUI provided as part of the Smart Fan 5 software.

However, that is not where it ends as Gigabyte decided to take some extra steps to achieve an even better cooling equilibrium for their motherboard. It has built-in MOSFET heatsinks that help to improve heat dissipation across the board as well as keeping the temperature lower to protect your components. The Z490 then employs a thick thermal pad with up to 5W/mK thermal conductivity. The design of the entire motherboard is grooved to provide better, more dense airflow to the circuitry.

GPU:

There’s a lot to say here in favor of the Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X motherboard. After all, it is a gaming motherboard and it even has gaming in its name! The real elephant in the room in this case is obviously the AMD CrossFire integration that the Z490 touts. AMD’s CrossFire mechanism allows a user to link two graphics cards together for double the performance in 2-Way CrossFire. This is much akin to Nvidia’s SLI technology, however, that is unfortunately not supported by the Z490 Gaming X. There is also the inconceivable AMD Quad-GPU technology allowing a user to harness the combined power of 4 graphics cards.

Conclusion:

Overall, a fair assessment of the Gigabyte Z490 Gaming X motherboard will inevitably lead to the conclusion that it is one of the best mid-tier, gaming oriented motherboards currently available on the market. It offers all the bells and whistles that a gamer would need to build a decent setup such as high energy efficiency, variety of connectivity ports, and good cooling setup. That coupled with its plethora of features and prices starting at around $200 in the US make it a no-brainer deal.