GIGABYTE Z390 UD (LGA 1151 (300 Series) Intel Z390 SATA 6Gb/s ATX Intel Motherboard for Cryptocurrency Mining with above 4G Decoding, 6 x PCIe Slots)

I bought this motherboard for an upgrade build (upgrading from an ASRock e3 and and OCed i5-2750k) on Black Friday, but just got around to installing the new hardware a few weeks ago. I have to say I am very pleased with this product. I would argue this is probably your best bet for a 390 chipset motherboard if you don't want to spend > $150. The components are high quality, good slot arrangement, good features, and it will support 9th gen Intel chips if you want to upgrade lader (may require a BIOS update). Further, everything worked perfectly on the first boot, I had zero issue getting any of my new hardware components to work at advertised values.Ease of use big plus, the board immediately recognized and changed the clock and timing values on my Corsair Vengeance memory to 3000mHz as soon as I toggled the memory OC feature on. I have had ZERO crashes or memory errors after 50+ hours of gaming, so the automatic settings seems to be perfectly stable. Note, if you wish to use this feature and have the board automatically detect and change the timings on anything over PC2400 memory be sure to purchase supported memory chips, there is a list on the Gigabyte website.BIOS features are numerous and allow for a very fine degree of control over everything from voltages, to timings, independent FSB clocks, and a variety of OC-friendly features as well. Similarly, the Gigabyte utility suite is very useful for tweaking OC settings without having to do a full reboot. My one complaint in this department is coming from an ASRock board there is no AXTU-style monitoring app included and you have to download a 3rd party app like CPUID or something similar, but that is a relatively minor complaint.I would highly recommend this board at present. Very nice quality and features for a sub-$150 z390 chipset board.

I purchased this for a new build centered on an Intel 9700K. I was a bit worried about power-handling as some reviews had other brands struggling to provide power to the high-end 9th generation processors. The word was that this one wouldn't have a problem, even though I favored another brand. I'll do this review in reverse.What you're not getting:USB-C - Even though it's a feature of the chipset, there is only a connector here. If you really need USB-C you would have to buy an accessory card from Gigabyte, which, I'm sure, would put the price over the cost on a board that included it. I personally couldn't come up with any reason I needed it. I don't own a USB-C device.High-end audio - This board uses an older Realtek audio processor. I have absolutely no idea what it sounds like, I already had a Creative Pro Studio card, so I disabled it right off. If you think you want or need high-end audio you may want to look elsewhere. I personally don't think any Realtek on-board solution is worth using, but I listen to a ton of music on my PC and I'm a bit of a snob that way so you can ignore me.RGB - Again, there is a socket on the board to plug in an RGB strip. I use a case with a nice black aluminum side panel. I didn't really care. In fact I went out of my way to buy no components that included RGB lights. There is a single blond light that I believe Gigabyte calls an "accent light" that provides a little illumination inside the case.The good news is, you seem to get everything else. The board is solidly constructed. It has metal supports around the GPU and Memory slots to provide support. Reasonable heat sinks are placed on the power supply components and elsewhere. There really isn't a lot to complain about. It's not flashy, your friends, if they could see it, wouldn't be impressed, but it does seem to be of very high quality.The best I can think to describe it, is that it's no different from Gigabyte's more expensive boards, except in the ways I've already mentioned. My guess is all of the critical components are the same until you get to their boards that cost four times as much.So, if you are looking for all the performance without all the flash, this might be for you. The $129 price certainly makes this a value, but only if you don't want or need the items I mentioned above. They didn't skimp on the important stuff.It runs the 9700K at all/5.0 turbo without a voltage tweak, and up to 5.2 before my cooling solution started to show a bit of strain. It actually ignored the 3.6ghz base frequency and simply runs all cores at 4.8ghz base without user intervention. It kind of makes sense, until you start increasing the voltage there really is no thermal consequence to doing so. All that really means is that, as the reviews I read stated, this board has absolutely no power handling issues with the highest level 9th gen Intel processors.There really is only one Con. I downloaded the Gigabyte utility package from their web site. It nagged me to install both Google Chrome (which I don't normally use) and Norton Internet Security. I finally gave up and uninstalled their whole utility package because every update kept trying to install crapware. Bleh!Otherwise it's highly recommended. The quality of a higher-end board without the frills you may not need.

This was a solid, very forgiving board for a first-time build. Everything snapped into place easily, and after double-checking, the system booted up perfectly on the first power-up.I used the following on my build, all of which so far is working nicely:- Cougar MX330-G Mid Tower Case, w/ tempered glass window- Intel Core i5-9400 (6-core 2.9GHz w/ on-chip graphics)- Corsair CX550M 550-watt 80+ Bronze Semi-Modular power supply- 2 x Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 (3000Hz) RAM - yeah, I like having a lot of memory- Samsung 860 EVO SSD (250GB)- Acer SA230 FHD monitor- a Corsair gaming mouse and Logitech wireless laptop from previous systemCould have spent a little less, but decided to go a bit heavier than initially expected on the CPU, power supply and memory. Still, everything fit well, all the ports were clearly-labelled, and even the slight bit of RGB lighting from the board is a nice touch (although I doubt I'll get into all that.)Powered up with a Linux Mint bootable flash-drive in the front USB port, and after a few keyboard presses, managed to quickly boot up. Installed Linux Mint (MATE) onto the SSD in less than 5 minutes, removed the flash drive, and it's just been under-10-second bootups since then. I don't do much gaming, but video and programming instead, so this is a great fit for my needs so far. I'll eventually add an M2 SSD, a larger HDD, and 32GB more memory (yep!) before I'll consider it finished. Eventually a larger monitor and maybe a budget graphics card too. The motherboard should be able to handle it all. Haven't even needed to fiddle with the BIOS yet, although that's coming.GREAT product for the price, the extra durability wound up being needed a time or two (first-time build, what can I say!) I'm quite the satisfied customer!