The Intel Z490 Overview: 44+ Motherboards Examined

ASUS ProArt Z490-Creator 10G

Designed for professionals and content creators, the ASUS ProArt Z490-Creator 10G offers a wide variety of premium features, with a lot of focus on networking and overall quality. Included with this board is an external ASUS Hyper 10G Ethernet controller, with an Intel 2.5 G Ethernet controller located on the rear panel. Some of its primary features include two PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots, dual Thunderbolt 3 Type-C connectivity, with support for 128 GB of DDR4-4600.

Looking at the design of the ProArt Z490-Creator 10G, it uses a simplistic black theme with straight angled ridged heatsinks, a gold-accented chipset heatsink and an L shaped power delivery heatsink designed to keep the 12+2 power delivery cool. The power delivery itself uses teamed power stages and uses a single 12 V ATX power input to provide power to the CPU. The board has three full-length PCIe 3.0 slots which run at x16, x8/x8, and x8/x8/+4, with two PCIe 3.0 x1 slots. For storage is a pair of PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots, each with its own heatsink, and also features six SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays. It also includes four memory slots with support for DDR4-4600 and up to 128 GB. Included in the accessories bundle is an ASUS Hyper 10G Ethernet controller add-on card. 

On the rear panel is two Intel Thunderbolt 3 Type-C ports, each with its own DisplayPort 1.4 video inputs for multi-monitor support. A single HDMITM 1.4b video output is present for users planning to utilize Intel's onboard graphics, while four USB 3.2 G2 10 Gbps Type-A, and two USB 3.2 G1 Type-A ports make up a stacked connectivity focused rear panel. The five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical output are powered by a Realtek S1220A HD audio codec, while the single Ethernet port is powered by an Intel I225-V 2.5 G controller.

The ASUS ProArt Z490-Creator 10G is heavily geared up for serious content creators that don't want to splurge a large amount of capital on a workstation platform such as X299 and TRX40 but still get as many useful features as possible for the money. The ASUS ProArt Z490-Creator 10G hasn't been given a price yet, but it's likely to cost around $550 which is more than a run of the mill mid-range model. It does, however, have dual Thunderbolt 3 Type-C connectivity, 10 G and 2.5 G Ethernet capabilities, and has two PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots with heatsinks for high-speed NVMe based storage devices.