Friday, October 22nd 2021
First MSI Intel Z690 Motherboards Leak
So far, all of the leaked Intel Z690 based motherboards have been void of anything from MSI, but now we get a look at some of their upcoming models courtesy of a couple of different leaks.This gives us a pretty good look at several different market segments from MSI, although none of its really high-end models have leaked yet.
MSI's product stack is a bit cryptic, as we have a pair of MEG boards, one MPG board, one MAG board and a more entry level Pro board. Starting from the bottom working our way up, the Pro Z690-A WiFi appears to be a slightly beefier version of its current Z590-A Pro, with DDR5 support, a pair of 8-pin 12 V EPS connectors, as well as a fourth M.2 slot for NVMe SSDs. We don't spot any real stand-out features on this board, but it looks fairly competent for the market segment.
A step up we have the MAG Z690 Tomahawk WiFi DDR4, which is also very close to its Z590 sibling, but has grown a PCIe x4 slot. The SATA port layout is quite odd on this board, with two ports being nestled under the chipset heatsink for no apparent reason. Once again we're looking at an upgrade to two EPS connectors and a total of four M.2 slots.
The MPG Z690 Force WiFi is a silvery take of MPG Z590 Gaming Force with what appears to be better heatsinks all around, but otherwise the connectivity looks to have remained mostly the same. It's also the first board where we get a look at the ports, but there's sadly nothing really interesting to see, as the layout is identical to the Z590 board.
Moving up the stack we have the MEG Z690 Unify-X and here there are some more obvious changes from its Z590 predecessor. First of all we have a pair of x16 PCIe slots, whereas the Z590 version only had one. Gone are the x1 PCIe slots in favour of a fourth M.2 slot, although the open-ended PCIe x4 slot remains. The heatsinks appear to have grown slightly and MSI has dropped the 6-pin power connector on the bottom of the board, although a PS/2 port has made an appearance around the back, alongside a second 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port, at the cost of some USB ports.
Finally MEG Z690 Unify, which has four rather than the two DIMM slots of the MEG Z690 Unify-X, but otherwise appears to be mostly identical in terms of features and appearance, much as its Z590 sibling. Both the Unify models should be DDR5 boards.
Sources:
WCCFTech, Videocardz
MSI's product stack is a bit cryptic, as we have a pair of MEG boards, one MPG board, one MAG board and a more entry level Pro board. Starting from the bottom working our way up, the Pro Z690-A WiFi appears to be a slightly beefier version of its current Z590-A Pro, with DDR5 support, a pair of 8-pin 12 V EPS connectors, as well as a fourth M.2 slot for NVMe SSDs. We don't spot any real stand-out features on this board, but it looks fairly competent for the market segment.
27 Comments on First MSI Intel Z690 Motherboards Leak
First LGA 1700 socket potentially affecting cooler mountings, RAM topology, power delivery designs.
First PCIe 5.0 CPU support ever
First PCIe 4.0 chipset support from Intel
First consumer DDR5 platform
First hybrid CPU architecture for Intel and Microsoft.
Each and every one of those likely means there will be some teething troubles. I love jumping on new platforms relatively soon but I will be waiting for multiple other people, reviewers, and fixes to happen before I even consider Z690.
As always, I'd rather be wrong and for Z690 to be a solid platform at a sensible price but I suspect it'll just be a bunch of $700 boards riddled with issues that need fixing. Some call it cynicism, but I call it "decades of experience".
Edit - Crap, I forgot one more:
First Intel 10nm silicon for desktops.
Going to stay away from first gen anything for now, since second gen seems to be a huge improvement for both Intel and AMD.
Just curious though, does anyone know why all of the last 4 generations of the Z models of mobos/chipsets etc HAD to have a "90" at the end ? Seems like it would have been simpler to just have a 400, 500, 600 etc instead of 390, 490, 590 & now 690....
Yea, I know there are also the xx10 series too, which IIRC are the lower-end/more budget-minded models, but still....
For Haswell(4th gen Intel - my 4690k CPU) the series is Z97. That's the high-end series. If you didn't know better and went for the cheapest series, you'd get a H81 chipset board(that'd be a crap choice for a 4690k). Then you'd have the H87, Z87, H97 and finally Z97.
H/Z87s were the older Haswells - the i5 4670k and i7 4770k CPUs were from those.
But out of the shown above - tomahawk looks good.
I know Intel had talked to and made agreements with TSMC but I didn't know which product lines it was for. Initial guesses were their GPUs and perhaps for access to 5nm/3nm nodes in the future.
If true, it means that Intel's 10nm++ process is still completely broken - as in, "too broken for the mainstream market" and that's valuable information that Intel have been trying to sweep under the rug because they've spent the last two straight years telling us, investors, and shareholders that 10nm is now "good" to use.
It won't be long before we need a metric like horsepower for transistor density, based on the theoretical density of one standardised transistor. Real world transistors vary in size just like real world horses vary in size and strength but the industry settled on horsepower as a defined quantity of power. We need the silicon manufacturing industry to come up with a "standardised transistor" size that so that process improvements and transistor design improvements can be quantifiably measured.
Also, that's probably not going to happen, because silicon fabrication is funded by making overblown marketing promises to rich investors. There's no incentive to dampen those marketing promises with quantifiable metrics, the whole point of exaggerating your likely results is the fine art of handwavium, the diametric opposite of standardised units. :D
This one looks like it's gonna be good too
See the last one. VRM temps of 115C on that X570-A Pro.
I'd rather go with a Tomahawk(Or an Asus board - if they weren't so damn overpriced these days).
Intel paper-launched Sandy bridge at CES in mid January, discovered the issue in January, and had B3 revision boards/chipsets on shelves by the beginning of March.
Unless you pre-ordered a P67 board and received it in January/February that year, you likely have a B3 revision board without the SATA issue.
I'm very well aware of what happened and as I said, I know people who had ports fail, even though it wasn't an instant thing, as they didn't exchange their boards.
Nothing to do with pre-ordering.
I bought mine in March and "B3 revisions" were the only models on sale; The B3 revision was prominent - not just on the box but directly in the retailer product listings. I ended up buying P8P67 boards for work that generation. I guess as always, it pays not to jump on something the instant it comes out and let other people be the paying beta testers. It's a shame that consumers tolerate being treated like shit by manufacturers and retailers because it gives manufacturers and retailers an excuse to keep doing it.
I'm not sure how much was done by retailers, but there clearly was enough time for the boards to end up in consumers hands and many weren't aware of the issue, so they never did anything about it, even though it wouldn't have cost them anything.
But yes, you're right, there's way too much beta testing going on and it's only getting worse. It's all about being "first" which is getting kind of annoying, especially when the product sometimes is dropped six months later and you don't get any support. I know Qualcomm messed up one of their Wi-Fi chips and they pretty much told their partners tough luck and their partners did the same to the consumers who got a poorly working 802.11ac router... Unlike Intel and P67, there was no exchange program, it was just another case of suck it up early adopter.