Asus Prime Z390-A Motherboard LGA1151 (Intel 8th and 9th Gen) ATX DDR4 DP HDMI M.2 USB 3.1 Gen2 Gigabit LAN

There were no reviews on this, so I felt like I was taking a bit of a risk, but considering the ASUS Z370-A MB was popular in reviews, I went for the Z390 Prime-A. I am glad I did. I am not a gamer, I work with DAWs and rendering video. I loaded it up with the i7-8700k and 16GB of G.Skill RAM, and the first boot (which I expected to be a disaster) ended up working flawlessly. I didn't expect it to have AURA RGB lighting, that was a fun surprise, but so far it is living up to all of its product description without any problems. The only trouble I ran into was installing drivers. For some reason, the included ASUS DVD would not let me install LAN or audio drivers, I had to find those driver directories on the DVD-ROM and install them by clicking "run as administrator."I went with ASUS because their BIOS gives you complete control over your PC by letting you change anything you want. It has an excellent GUI whether you aren't sure what you are doing, or you are an advanced user. The overclocking software and fan control software are very easy to use, and probably the best (and safest) way to learn how to control your PC hardware.UPDATE - 1 year laterI recently damaged this motherboard, and had to replace it. I looked through ASUS' other products, and determined, this was still the BEST choice for my needs and ended up replacing it with this exact one. It has tons of USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports, I have had no hassle with any of its features, except for the sound. I use 2 Mackie powered monitors for speakers, and I have a 1/8 stereo --> 2 RCA Y cable going into them. I would continually get buzzing noise interference from the GPU through the speakers. Replacing the GPU made no difference. Replacing the motherboard also makes no difference. If you end up with this problem, here is the fix: Buy a Ground Loop Noise Isolator (for car stereos) for $8 on Amazon. It may be a defect, or it might just be the wiring in my house, but if the ASUS folks are paying attention, you should build these into your systems!The AI Suite Software turned out to be ridiculously dense - full of options and features to control your case fans and CPU cooler, OC your CPU (and GPU if it's an ASUS make), conserve power when you don't really need all the speed, and it will even call up OC settings when you open specific apps. This should be a much bigger selling point than it appears to be.Other quirks - The RGB is 12V only! If you end up getting something with a 3 pin connector, or Addressable RGB, I found this amazing adapter if you search: DeepCool RGB Converter ($15) and you can plug other RGB devices in don't work with Aura, and it will let you use them with your RGB headers on this motherboard. The 3 orange fans in the attached photo are "addressable RGB" fans that aren't compatible with Aura, but are now controlled by Aura.This is probably the best motherboard when it comes to people like me who do a lot of work with DAWs, Video editing, and occassional gaming with one GPU. Apparently if you use the other PCIE port, it only runs at 8x native instead of 16x. This is fine if you're not trying to reap all the performance you can out of 2 video cards.It is also nice to have an upgrade path for the day I want to beef up my system in the future. I'm already making my plans for a X-series processor when they're "old" and affordable a few years down the road. I am still very satisfied with the unit and plan on using it for years to come.

While I wanted a high end gaming PC, I don't really want to bother with overclocking or running SLI or anything else that would be found on the higher end motherboards. This was a great value of having the stuff I wanted (good chipset, easy to use UEFI BIOS, good on board audio) and not paying for the stuff I didn't need like 3 way SLI, dual gigabit lan, advanced overclocking features (it has overclocking features, I don't know how extensive as I don't really plan on using them), etc.The only downside that I was not a big fan of was that the rear IO shield is cheap looking aluminum. Not a big deal but reading the IO ports is fairly difficult if it's under a desk and you're trying to get to the back of the PC.The EUFI BIOS is quite nice. Being able to update your BIOS from within the BIOS is neat. NVIDIA also has something built in where the first time you boot windows, it will ask to install all the drivers directly without any internet connection required. This makes new installs so easy to get to a functioning driver and can easily be disabled if you don't want it. I will say that the updater software that came with it that is supposed to tell me if there's a new version of the bios available doesn't work reliably. We bought two of these and both of them upgraded (to different versions) and then told us there was no more available updates. We checked the webpage for an upgrade and there was a completely different version available.

"Used - Very good" Warehouse deal was a steal, since right now these boards are overpriced when purchased new.I feel I got lucky, as it came with all the accessories and had basically no cosmetic imperfections, just missing the original box.It is working flawlessly with an [email protected] sporting 8-phase VRMs which are staying nice and cool, compared to my old ASUS TUF Z370-Pro Gaming which has a weak 4-phase design. The VRMs of the latter were overheating (110°C) and throttling at stock clocks within minutes, at full load on a measly 95 Watt power limit (Intel's default TDP settings for the i9). That old board worked fine with a locked [email protected], which only drew 65 Watts max after undervolting it a bit. Unfortunately, it was unfit for a CPU upgrade and ended up finding this Z390-A board was a sweet upgrade.The RGB refractive window on the I/O cover looks stunning, especially all red looks like a fat ruby; sadly the chipset cover lights are hidden behind the GPU. This one also has 2 non-addressable 12V RGB headers, which my previous board was lacking.Only issue I had was with installing the GPU, where its PCI bracket was hitting the white plastic cover that extends below the I/O. Required a bit of fiddling to get it to fit. It appears this cover may be protecting the audio circuitry under it.The first 2 PCIe 8x slots are metal reinforced, which ASUS doesn't even advertise on this board indicating that this is a higher end product where this kind of stuff is expected. I was pleasantly surprised after noticing, since ASUS used it as marketing for it's TUF board, which isn't so tough after all because in the end I realized the TUF-Gaming line is just durable, not high end.