ASRock's New Z390 Motherboards Show Up Early
 

While a lot of speculation in regards to Z390 motherboards has been made recently, ASRock has jumped the gun (on purpose?) and unveiled its upcoming gaming-focused Z390 product stack officially.

The newest addition to ASRock's motherboard SKU list is the introduction of the new Phantom Gaming series which uses the brand new Realtek RTL8125AG 2.5G NIC which we initially speculated on yesterday. Inclusive of the new Realtek RTL8125AG gaming-focused LAN on ASRock's Phantom Gaming range is a new software package which allows users to intelligently shape traffic while gaming to as ASRock eloquently puts it "accelerate critical gaming network traffic ahead of other data to provide smoother, stutter-free game performance and give gamers the ultimate competitive edge".

ASRock's new offerings, currently listed as supporting Intel's 8th Generation CPUs, include the flagship Z390 Phantom Gaming 9 with 2.5G LAN with a pairing of dual Intel-based NICs to offer a total of three LAN ports on the rear panel. Along with this is 2T2R Wave 2 802.11ac Wi-Fi with support for up to 1.73 Gbps of bandwidth.

Also included in the new line up is the Z390 Phantom Gaming 6 which features a cut down feature set to the Phantom Gaming 9, but still retaining a lot of the gaming-focused features, such as 2.5G+2x1G. The Z390 Phantom Gaming 4, Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI and Z390 Phantom Gaming SLI AC look to cater towards users looking towards the mid-range of the Z390 motherboards at launch. This also includes the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac mini-ITX motherboard with 2T2R 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec dual PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots and an integrated Thunderbolt 3 port onto the rear panel.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13440...0-motherboards