Will They Be Worth the Upgrade?

This week at CES 2021, a bit under the radar, Asus and other major motherboard makers announced their lineups of new Intel Z590 motherboards, set to launch on January 27. That is well ahead of Intel’s upcoming 11th Gen Core “Rocket Lake-S” desktop CPUs, which are slated for shelves sometime in March. Asus wasn’t the first board maker to officially acknowledge the existence of Z590 boards (that honor goes to Gigabyte). But now that Intel has pulled back the curtain on Rocket Lake, manufacturers are free to follow suit with their own corresponding announcements.

But what is Z590 exactly, and what improvements does it promise over the Z490 platform (which itself launched a mere nine months ago)? Is it a must-have for leading-edge gamers and content creators, or just another minor upgrade for Intel, which finds itself in a pitched, relentless battle with AMD and its long-running Socket AM4-compatible motherboards?

From Z490 to Z590: An Evolutionary Step Up

One sticking point during Intel’s launch of its 10th Generation Core (“Comet Lake-S”) chips last year was the upgrade to the Z490 platform, which, while capable of supporting PCI Express 4.0 in theory, has thus far only utilized PCI Express 3.0 in practice. (At the time of launch, some motherboard vendors tagged some of their Z490 boards as PCI Express 4.0 “ready”; what that will mean, once the actual 11th Generation Core chips hit, remains to be seen.)

PCI Express 4.0 at the moment is mainly of interest to folks deploying the latest high-speed SSDs. The new Z590 platform will bake that in, bringing with it a host of improvements, including support for 16 available PCI Express 4.0 lanes, as well as DDR4-3200 (up from a limit of DDR4-2933 on Z490) as a standard memory speed. The boards will also throw in support for both Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6, while certain models will look forward with support for USB 4 and the cutting-edge Wi-Fi 6E.

Also out in the open now are specs for the “lesser” 500 series chipsets below Z590. For some more granular detail, let’s look at how the recent Intel chipsets shape up against one another…

As you can see above, on the whole, many of the improvements from Z490 to Z590 are incremental, and they represent one of the shorter leaps in technology that Intel has taken between chipsets in some time.

We don’t know a whole lot about the Intel Core i9-11900K, aside from what little morsels Intel let drop at its CES 2021 presentation (or about the rest of the 11th Generation stack, for that matter; the Core i9-11900K was the only Rocket Lake chip model that Intel identified by name). According to a report from Anandtech, both Z490 and Z590 chipsets will support the 10th Generation Comet Lake-S and 11th Generation Rocket Lake-S chip families. Things gets a bit stickier as you go down the line of the 400 Series chipsets, though, with support for Rocket Lake dropping off with B460 and H410 motherboards, while anyone on H470, Q470, or Z490 will need to update their motherboard BIOS to use an 11th Generation chip on the platform.

The predictable array of Z590 motherboards hit the wires this week, with the usual major makers (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Asrock) all releasing details about their respective offerings coming down the pipeline. Board makers like Asus have gone the extra mile with some of their features, with one flagship board (Asus Maximus XIII Extreme Glacial Z590) adding an internal liquid-cooling block covering the entirety of the chipset elements and hot-running board bits like VRMs. The radical design makes it easier than ever for overclockers to get the absolute maximum amount of power and thermal regulation out of their systems, while also giving chips like the Core i9-11900K the kind of cooling they’ll need to perform at their best if overclocked. Other makers are also pouring on the high-end features in their established top-end series, with MSI offering Godlike and Ace models, and Asrock its usual Taichi. Of course, lesser, and less costly, Z590 boards are also in the offing, too.

If you’re upgrading from, say, an already top-end Z390 or Z290 board from a few years back, Z590 in extreme boards like the Maximus XIII Glacial or MSI MEG Z590 Godlike are probably the next logical step in a top-tier performance arsenal. However, many folks who just bought a Z490 board will find themselves perfectly okay with the tech they already have, and the cost of upgrading to Z590 will just be too much to justify the minimal feature gains that something like a boosted VRM or slightly upticked Wi-Fi, USB, and Thunderbolt features might offer.

But even with all these new features and tech being announced as a part of the Z590 launch, and the new buzz surrounding Intel’s coming top-end chips, we must always come back to question of AMD…and, specifically, the company’s AM4 Socket.

Will Z590 Make AMD Blink?

AMD continues to grandfather in as many motherboards as it can to the consumer-level Ryzen family of CPUs, and Intel asking potential buyers to pony up for yet another motherboard upgrade seems untenable by comparison unless you’re upgrading from several generations back. Socket AM4 and its surrounding, successive chipsets have held strong as one of the most flexible desktop platforms that AMD has ever released, with reasonable compatibility stretching all the way back to B350, up to the current generation of X570 motherboards.

That level of compatibility is important when discussing the prospect of how much your next system upgrade might cost, and while an older AMD chipset like the B350 may not have universal support for all the latest USB protocols, raw spec bumps aren’t everything in the world of most PC owners. Desktop PC buyers fall into many different categories, but one of the most populous is the “upgrader” class. This is a category of PC owners who, rather than purchasing a brand new desktop every time there’s a product refresh, are more likely to tack newer parts onto aging motherboards in order to squeeze out as much value over the years as they can.

Intel did flash a few “Rocket Lake” benchmarks during its CES presentation, which showed some select games running faster on an Intel Core i9-11900K than an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, by a couple of percentage points. 

Now mind you, citing Intel’s own numbers, even in titles where Intel is favored, at most players can expect just a 4% difference in games like Far Cry: New Dawn? Suddenly the cost of upgrading to a Z590 motherboard and an Intel Core i9-11900K doesn’t look so good when a bleeding-edge CPU like the Ryzen 9 5900X can slot into a B450 board, if need be (pending, perhaps, a BIOS update at most).

For PC builders and upgraders who are watching every dollar in their Amazon, Microcenter, or Newegg shopping carts, the Z590 may seem largely overkill. The launch of Z590 is promising some of the boldest designs we’ve seen in motherboards yet. (Take the Maximus XIII Extreme Glacial as Exhibit A.) But the added price of upgrading to Z590 from Z490 won’t likely translate to performance that outdoes the Ryzen 5000 Series in a big enough way to motivate most buyers who aren’t upgrading from something old and ditching all their supporting components.

If the Core i9-11900K, the Z590 chipset, and imperceptibly better frame rates on Gears of War 5 at 1080p are the best Intel can do right now, AMD is about to drag out a long winter for the company even further. With AMD doing most of what Intel can in the mainstream enthusiast space faster or cheaper, even the most innovatively cooled motherboards don’t look like they’ll change the larger balance of that equation in early ’21. That said, we’re looking forward to putting Rocket Lake silicon to the test and seeing how it shapes up.