Gigabyte’s Z390 Gaming SLI and Aorus Elite motherboards pictured

Z390 series motherboards will offer two major improvements over Z370, offering lower chipset power consumption thanks to the chipset’s move to 14nm and the addition of integrated WiFi and USB 3.1 Gen 2 support, eliminating the need for some 3rd party chipsets/add-ons. 

Videocardz has managed to get a sneak peek at two of these new Z390 motherboards, both of which are from Gigabyte. First up, we have the company’s Z390 Gaming SLI, a budget-oriented Z390 motherboard which features support for Nvidia’s SLI technology. It is worth noting here that SLI and budget-oriented are two phrases that no longer mix, with Nvidia removing multi-GPU/SLI support from their low-end lineups, from the GTX 1060 or lower on the 10-series and on their RTX 2070 or lower on their Turing series of graphics hardware. 

As a non-Aorus Gigabyte motherboard, we can expect some compromises when compared to its more costly counterparts, which seems to include a lowering of the number of USB ports or other connections on the Gaming SLI’s rear I/O. We can also see that only two of the board’s four DDR4 DRAM slots feature reinforcements, making the change obvious to end-users. The mainboard would almost look better without any reinforced DRAM slots, as the two reinforced slots only serve to draw attention to the two unstrengthened slots.