Every motherboard with a Z490 chipset
has one thing in common, Intel, Intel, Intel.
Wait a minute, what in the heck is this thing?
It says Z490, but there it is.
Obviously an AMD CPU socket.
Where did this thing come from?
Reddit obviously, don't you read the video title?
But more importantly, what is it?
Why did they make it?
Why ultimately didn't they make more of them?
And how does this compare
to the AMD motherboards we know and love?
These three M.2 slots tell us
that the story might have something to do with PCIe lanes,
but from what we've been able to glean,
this entire chipset was canceled before it could be released.
Is this the competitor that could have been?
Did we miss out on something amazing?
Well, it turns out that for an engineering experiment,
it's surprisingly functional.
So we're gonna be taking it for a spin
with close attention to all the curious little details.
After you pay close attention
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This strange motherboard first appeared on Reddit
which is kind of wild because as skeptical as I was,
this is no hoax.
This is an AMD CPU socket
and it is on a motherboard with a Z490 chipset.
Just not the kind of Z490 chipset
that you might think.
Now we have seen motherboards in the past
with support for both Intel and AMD CPUs.
Most recently from ECS using a daughterboard.
But if you look carefully at that product,
the chipset is actually on that secondary board.
That's because both AMD and Intel use proprietary protocols
and no modern motherboard chipset
is capable of communicating with CPUs from both vendors.
So no, this is not an AMD socket
Frankensteined onto an Intel chipset board,
but rather just another case of AMD
ripping off Intel's naming scheme
to make it seem like they're a generation ahead.
But that doesn't mean that it's boring.
Let's jump in and see how close this thing was
to being ready.
One thing we can tell immediately
between the particular shade of orange they use
and the lettering for the silkscreen,
not to mention the fact that it says gigabyte right on it,
is that this board was originally from gigabyte.
And while it might be missing some of the cosmetics,
we can also tell that it was based
on the X470 Aorus Gaming 7.
Because between the layout and features
and from looking at the pixels,
you can tell they've got a lot in common.
For our CPU, given that this is in the same family
as the rest of AMD's 400 series motherboards,
I think it is possible, well probable,
that first and second gen Ryzen chips,
like this 2700X, will work.
But even though X470 boards, like this one's cousin,
can be updated to support third and up to fifth gen,
well, there are no BIOS updates available
for engineering samples,
so third gen and up would be basically impossible.
As for RAM, we'll be going with these G.Skill Flare X sticks
rated for 3,200 megatransfers per second.
2000 series chips could do better
and did benefit from faster,
but this was kind of the bang for the buck speed at the time
that I would expect any motherboard
to support fairly easily.
And finally, it's SSD time,
bringing us to the most obvious advantage of this chipset
compared to X470, an extra M.2 slot.
Okay, I'm leaving out some important details here.
It's not quite as simple as slapping on an extra slot
and calling it a day.
You actually need the PCI Express lanes
to support that slot, and this board's X470 cousin
is clearly already maxing out this platform's 32 lanes.
So then, how does this one have more?
Ah, the secret is under this heat sink.
With it removed, we'll find a couple of things.
First is the AMD chipset itself.
This looks pretty darn similar to an X470 chipset
and honestly, probably uses the exact same silicon.
It wouldn't be the first time we saw a manufacturer
artificially limit the features on a chipset
to address different price points.
If you remember from our Intel R&D Center tour,
they actually have special chipsets for development
that they can reconfigure through software
to be any member of the 12th Gen chipset family
that they wish.
So the different codes etched in the top
are probably the only things
that differentiate this from an X470.
But what's this?
A chip from PLX.
Yes, this seems to be the secret sauce
of the AMD Z490 chipset that enables it
to have four extra general purpose Gen 3 PCIe lanes.
It's also a big part of the reason this board,
and any like it, never made it to the market.
More on that later.
This chip is known as a multiplexer,
and while PLX is probably the best known,
they are just one of the many manufacturers
who produce them.
A multiplexer's purpose is to connect
multiple PCIe devices downstream
to the same lanes originating from the CPU,
or for that matter, from the AMD chipset.
Now obviously, a multiplexer can't magically
create extra bandwidth,
and if every single downstream device
was running full tilt at the same time,
it would be bottlenecked.
But that rarely happens,
and these devices were very common back in the mid 2000s
in the heyday of SLI,
so that motherboard manufacturers could squeeze
as many 16x slots as possible onto a motherboard
for three-way and four-way configurations.
Of course, now that multiple GPUs
aren't really a thing anymore,
the focus for this chipset was on increasing support
for NVMe SSDs.
Now, because I really wanna load this thing up
and see just how close it was to final,
we're gonna be going high-end here
with three of these awesome
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus PCIe Gen 4 drives.
We're gonna have those and more linked down below.
Oh, whoops, I've got these on wrong,
and evidently we need hook and loop fastener
to hold down this one.
It doesn't have all the mounting hardware, all right?
It's an engineering sample.
Don't worry though, that's an older one, not a Rocket Plus.
Other fun quirks, once we've got the board powered up,
here we go, watch this.
All the RGB on the motherboard lights up in white,
and then that's the last time you're ever gonna see it
because any control for it appears
to have been completely removed from the BIOS.
I mean, you don't need no RGB
on an engineering board, do you?
Surprisingly, all three of these slots do work,
but not everything about the board does.
Even though I haven't personally tested it yet,
we did test it before getting started,
and there are absolutely some quirks on this board.
The bottom PCIe slot, for example, is completely dead,
and so is the onboard networking.
What's curious is that the network chip
is detected in Windows, but no driver package from Intel
that we could find would install,
so it's possible that it's an engineering sample as well.
Ryzen 2000 chips didn't have onboard GPUs,
so this is the only way for us to get a video output.
Speaking of video output,
we've been outputting some really great exclusive videos
over on flowplane.com.
How about this one, showcasing some of the TikTok hacks
we tried that you won't find on YouTube?
Big moment.
To be clear, I am expecting it to work.
It's just that this kind
of borderline engineering sample stuff,
if you look at it wrong or blow on it too hard,
sometimes it stops working, so nothing's a guarantee.
Hello?
Yes, okay.
Time to see what else works, or doesn't work.
As it turns out, the USB headers do work.
The back IO all works, except for ethernet.
Even the USB-C port, so here's one of our Steam drives,
which should allow us to game
on this completely unreleased motherboard.
Man, everything about this just feels
and looks completely normal.
2700X, eight-core processor,
it's turboing as you would expect.
Gigabyte Z490 Aorus Master.
Chipset.
AMD Promontory.
I don't remember what their code name was for X470.
Promontory means it has a Zen 2 ready BIOS.
That's it?
Wait, Bixby?
How does Bixby figure into all of this?
My arch nemesis returns.
No, these are code names.
Promontory was used for everything from A320 to B550,
and Bixby was used for X570.
I think the most notable thing about all of this
is how not notable it is, though.
Everything is operating exactly as I would expect.
The interesting thing about this run isn't the score,
but rather how fast the CPU turbos.
We're sitting at anywhere between around 3.9 to 4 gigahertz,
which is about what we'd expect.
Our Wi-Fi card is only 2.4 gigahertz,
so I guess we're gonna be pushing it a little harder even
by throwing a network card in this slot here
and seeing if the whole thing will run together.
We're off the rails now, ladies and gentlemen.
Not in a good place.
Bah, bah, I got him.
Okay, I need shields, I need shields.
No!
There's an invisible guy behind me,
but that's not what's important.
What's important is that I'm running
at 118 frames per second in Halo Infinite.
Obviously, that's not like the most FPSs ever
or anything like that, but what it is is working.
Okay, it's a normal motherboard,
which means you're probably wondering a few things,
first and foremost being why AMD chose
the Z blank 90 naming convention,
which is associated exclusively with Intel,
or well, almost exclusively.
And the particularly savvy among you
are probably wondering how it is that this Z490 project
came about before Intel's Z490.
Well, this isn't the first time that AMD has pulled
this kind of product naming one-upmanship.
Back when Intel's X299 chipset was the king of the hill,
AMD released their competing Threadripper platform, X399,
seemingly to paint Intel into a corner
and make it seem like when Intel launched their next gen,
that they were copying AMD when actually
they were just following their own established pattern
and AMD ruined the party.
But unconventional naming
isn't what gets the product canceled.
What does is price.
Those PLX chips were seemingly necessary
for motherboard manufacturers to market their boards
as Z490, and they came at a heavy price.
You'd have easily been paying 300 to even $350 for what?
An extra drive?
How many of you even have more than one M.2 drive today,
let alone four plus years ago?
Add to that that teams would have needed
to do new BIOS engineering and provide long-term support
for what would have probably been a low volume product
and suddenly the X470 Aorus Gaming 7 that this is based on
looks like a much more compelling value at $240 brand new.
To be honest then,
I don't think we really missed out on anything here.
Sure, there are some people out there
who would benefit from more PCIe lanes,
but 2000 series and 3000 series Ryzen
also had Threadripper equivalents that,
I mean, by the time you're spending
this kind of money on a motherboard,
not only had more PCIe lanes,
but also more memory bandwidth
and the possibility for higher core counts.
If only AMD had kept their promise for platform longevity,
which you can tell I'm totally over.
And besides, AMD already had X570 under development
to provide more lanes than the X470 chipset
that it replaced.
I can see why AMD officially canceled Z490
at Computex in 2018.
I mean, X570 came out less than a year later.
So all in all, rest in peace, confusingly named chipset,
you died before you could live
and were forgotten not long after.
Just like this segue to our sponsor.
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Thanks for checking out this rare motherboard with us.
I really love it when we get these kinds
of engineering samples or prototypes to mess around with.
It can be kind of hit or miss.
This one was a hit, but if you wanna see a miss,
check out the video that Alex and I did
where we looked at a prototype water-cooled laptop.