Choosing Z790 MOBO brand

[w1nger1]

For MOBO I usually go for ASUS or Gigabyte, my initial choice was ASUS ROG STRIX Z790-F GAMING WIFI, but it is so expensive atm, so I started looking for alternatives.
Gigabyte Z790 AORUS ELITE AX (rev. 1.0) seems like an ok choice, is about 40% cheaper in my area, but while I was at it, I started looking at other brands too.
MSI and ASRock both have Z790 MOBO, ASRock in general are the cheapest overall, but I have no idea are they any good, so should I stick with ASUS or Gigabyte or go for cheaper alt.?

 

Here are the other planned components 

• Intel Core i5-13600K or Intel Core i5-13600KF
• G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory
• ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3080 V2 OC Edition 10GB

This built is mainly for gaming, occasionally editing some drone footage. I will eventually OC it after it is around 2nd year into service.

 

So if you have any comment and/or recommendation, please feel free to fire away.

[RONOTHAN##]

If you want to save some money, Z690 boards generally are the way to go, since the only disadvantages are slightly slower PCIe lanes from the chipset (8 of the Gen 4 lanes on Z790 are Gen 3 lanes on Z690), one less high speed USB port, a somewhat weaker memory topology, and you need to update the BIOS with BIOS flashback before you can use the board. The slightly slower PCIe lanes is not really a big deal until you start looking at a very high end board since the low end boards generally don't take full advantage of them anyway, the one less USB port is not a very big deal for most people and can be fixed with an add in card, the weaker memory topology only starts to matter when you're running 4x16GB of RAM or trying to run speeds above 6000MT/s (Gigabyte's low end Z690 boards top out at 6000MT/s, their higher end boards as well as every other manufacturer top out at around 6200-6400MT/s), and BIOS flashback is easy enough to do that I wouldn't really worry about it. 

 

MSI's Z690 lineup is usually the best bang for the buck you can find, boards like the Z690-A Pro are really solid and really cheap. There are other boards that are good as well, the Z690 Force, Carbon, Unify (preferably the -X revision for it's awesome 1DPC memory topology if you want to push high memory speeds), and Tomahawk, so I'd personally get whichever of those is the cheapest with the feature set you want. ASUS boards are fine, though everything outside the Strix lineup doesn't have BIOS flashback so it would be a PITA to get them to work with a 13600K, and the Strix lineup is also a lot more expensive than the MSI boards. Gigabyte's boards are fine as well, though they have a really weak memory topology on Z690 that I would recommend you avoid if possible. ASRock boards just don't have a lot of info on them, not a lot of people bought them (mostly because they were pretty overpriced for the feature set they offered for the first few months after launch), so I can't comment on whether they're good or not, but the aforementioned MSI boards would be the best. 

 

If you're dead set on a Z790 board, the Elite AX would likely be my pick. ASRock has made good boards in the past, their B550 lineup was really good, and the favorite board in my collection is an ASRock Z170 OC Formula, but their low end lineup of motherboard is generally hit or miss, especially on Intel where the motherboard manufacturers need to put a ton of effort into tuning the BIOS, and even more so towards within the first few months after a board launch. They've got some boards I'd consider interesting, the LiveMixer and Taichi are both interesting boards, but at the same time the Elite AX is cheaper than those and it has been confirmed good, so unless you want to take a gamble the Elite AX would be the way to go. Maybe look at the Z790-A Pro, see if it's at a good price, though assuming US pricing is pretty similar the Z790-A Pro is a little more expensive and doesn't really do anything the Elite AX doesn't do. 

[w1nger1]

33 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

If you're dead set on a Z790 board, the Elite AX would likely be my pick. ASRock has made good boards in the past, their B550 lineup was really good, and the favorite board in my collection is an ASRock Z170 OC Formula, but their low end lineup of motherboard is generally hit or miss, especially on Intel where the motherboard manufacturers need to put a ton of effort into tuning the BIOS, and even more so towards within the first few months after a board launch. They've got some boards I'd consider interesting, the LiveMixer and Taichi are both interesting boards, but at the same time the Elite AX is cheaper than those and it has been confirmed good, so unless you want to take a gamble the Elite AX would be the way to go. Maybe look at the Z790-A Pro, see if it's at a good price, though assuming US pricing is pretty similar the Z790-A Pro is a little more expensive and doesn't really do anything the Elite AX doesn't do. 

Yea, mostly going for Z790 board, I know Z670 is probably the bang for the buck way to go, but I got some extra bucks from a freelance job, so thinking treating myself with something shiny.

[RONOTHAN##]

13 minutes ago, w1nger1 said:

Yea, mostly going for Z790 board, I know Z670 is probably the bang for the buck way to go, but I got some extra bucks from a freelance job, so thinking treating myself with something shiny.

To be fair, most Z690 boards IMO are better than their Z790 counterparts outside the memory topology advantages. The Z690 Carbon, for instance, has a better feature set (x8/x8 support, leading to more usable M.2 slots and the ability to run multiple high bandwidth PCIe cards). One exception to that is XOC boards like the Unify-X and Tachyon, which are basically all better than the majority of Z790 boards in terms of feature set and performance, with the only exceptions to that being their Z790 replacements when they start showing up more regularly. Z790 Taichi is also a straight upgrade over the Z690 Taichi, though the Z690 Taichi was also a really weird board. 

 

I still wouldn't necessarily fault you for going Z790 instead of Z690, just be warned that you can likely get a higher end Z690 board for the same price as a lower end Z790 board, so unless you need to memory support (and again, doesn't apply to the 1DPC XOC boards, those are pretty great for memory support, though they're also really expensive) you can probably get a better board by going for a last gen Z690 board. 

Edited November 25, 2022 by RONOTHAN##
Forgot some stuff