Review on GIGABYTE Z390 LGA1151 Realtek Motherboard by Brian Motley

Sturdy board. I installed Intel 9900k. Looking at the construction, the capacitors look decent and the circuit board traces are fine. I would rate the flex as average, I would have preferred a little more thickness, but that's ok. My board arrived used and missing the screws and tabs even though I bought it new but hey it works and I'm not going to eat it. Not a very good job by either Gigabyte or Revain, I don't know what happened there. I had offsets from a previous build so it doesn't matter. Even with the latest firmware, there are still some bugs in the bios. It doesn't always remember all your settings, and on my board the fan speed control didn't work unless you connected a fan to CPU1. This means that if you use custom cable routing, you run the risk of overheating something until you fix the fans. There are only six ports for hard drives so I had to buy an extra card, no big deal but my previous board had ten ports. USB. so far the speeds are good. The I/O shield has a 3.1 port, a bunch of USB 3.0, and a few legacy USBs, so that's a good thing. Audio advertised as special is nothing special. Worse, there's no optical output on the I/O panel, although there's plenty of room for one, so an epic audio fail, especially for a gaming board. Graphics: You can set the BIOS to use the integrated graphics. and graphics card at the same time, good for video editing or anything that requires multiple additional monitors. The BIOS supports hot-swapping for all hard drives as a switch. This is a relatively small board so make sure you have enough space for what you plan to connect. it.Overclocking: A finicky bios makes this a chore, but you can overclock decently with this board. The BIOS layout is really poor quality but it actually works. I wouldn't buy this board again but it's ok. I will update in a few months.