In Z390 Release, ASRock Leaks Intel's 9th Gen Naming

By Zhiye Liu
published

Today, motherboard manufacturer ASRock officially revealed its army of Z390 motherboards to house Intel's next line of Core CPUs. Of particular interest is the branding that ASRock used to describe the chips, referring to them as 9th generation. Before this, the branding of these chips remained unconfirmed, with a leaked slide previously having them titled as 9000-series under the 8th gen umbrella. But with ASRock's latest listing, it seems the chips will, indeed, be considered 9th generation. 

Of course, in addition to this chip naming leak, there's also the introduction of a pile of new ASRock motherboards.

ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming Motherboards

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With the launch of the new Z390 chipset, ASRock has finally wheeled its ancient Fatal1ty gaming brand into retirement and replaced it with the brand new Phantom Gaming monicker. The latest Z390 Phantom Gaming series of motherboards retain a classic black and red look and comes with the brand's Polychrome RGB lighting system. There is a total of six different models.

The ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 9 proudly wears the flagship badge for this generation and has every right to do so. The motherboard employs a sturdy 12-phase power delivery subsystem and ASRock's own Hyper BCLK Engine II for enhanced stability, performance and overclocking potential. It also supports up to 64GB of memory and DDR4 speeds up to 4,266MHz through overclocking. However, the motherboard's most distinctive feature is the 2.5G Ethernet port, which boosts networking performance up to 2.5 times as compared to a standard Gigabit port. 

Currently, ASRock is one of the few manufacturers to have a Mini-ITX Z390 motherboard in its arsenal. The ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac comes with everything that you would expect from a tiny, high-end motherboard. It can accommodate up to 32GB of memory, DDR4 speeds over 4,500MHz and two high-speed M.2 NVMe SSDs.

ASRock Z390 Taichi Motherboards

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ASRock hasn't forgotten about aficionados of its high-end Taichi motherboards. The Z390 Taichi Ultimate and Z390 Taichi motherboards incorporate the exact 12-phase power delivery subsystem and Hyper BCLK Engine II as found on the Z390 Phantom Gaming models. The biggest difference between the Ultimate and Standard products is that the Ultimate ones come with a 10 Gigabit LAN port based on Aquantia's AQC107 controller.

ASRock didn't reveal the pricing or availability of its Z390 motherboards.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • PapaCrazy
    With all these perfectly prepared images and the constant flow of information coming out about 9900k and z390, this doesn't seem like a leak as a much as a very controlled squirt. And I'm tired of getting squirted on. Just release it already.
    Reply
  • alexxbros
    Is there 9900k work on z370 boards as well
    Reply
  • DerekA_C
    I personally am tired of this tick tock style on advancements both AMD and Intel need to start thinking about having more then one architectural design team with completely different outlooks and ideas of it and compete within the company per teams like Apple did with Apple and Mac team pretty sure I remember that correctly. well it did bring innovation within Apple.
    Reply
  • ubercake
    21377218 said:
    With all these perfectly prepared images and the constant flow of information coming out about 9900k and z390, this doesn't seem like a leak as a much as a very controlled squirt. And I'm tired of getting squirted on. Just release it already.

    I was going to say... "Leaks" seem a normal part of everyday tech marketing.
    Reply
  • rwxy
    21377263 said:
    Is there 9900k work on z370 boards as well

    Yes it's been confirmed: https://gnd-tech.com/2018/09/intel-9th-gen-i9-9900k-cpus-will-run-on-z370-motherboards/
    Reply
  • alexxbros
    Yep, i know that,thank you :)
    Is that because i have already z370 board, and i wonder if have some of this in the future ... there is no sense .. :)
    Reply
  • Uilleam
    Nothing being put out right now gives me the incentive to go buy anything new. Advancements in technology lately has been slow and incremental. Unless I see something really mind blowing my current system will last me a long time without the need to upgrade or go out and buy a new motherboard and CPU. Basically not a lot has changed over the last few years. Example: When they went from the 6700k to 7700k all they really added were more pcie lanes and better 4k support on the 7700k. Now all Intel does is just keep adding more cores that hardly anyone will ever be able to take advantage of.
    Reply
  • italiceye
    Is it just me or is Intel just blatantly copying AMD?

    AMD released Ryzen with a buttload of cores for less money and suddenly Intel, which has been stuck on 4/8 for mainstream for so long is like, "ah, well we have 6 core chips too!"

    And then AMD decided to go the fancy case route for Threadripper and ho what a coincidence that the top of the line chip for 9000 series has a unique design.

    It's kind of embarrassing to be honest. It makes them look really desperate.
    Reply