The ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 7 Motherboard Review: Prepare for 9900KS

Board Features

The ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 7 ($196) directly replaces and pushes down the Z390 Phantom Gaming 6 ($166) a little down the product stack. With the newer Z390 Phantom Gaming 7, ASRock has made minor, but fairly significant tweaks to the newer version. Taking care of the on-board audio is a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec which powers the board's rear panel connections, while a Texas Instruments NE5532 headphone amplifier is present to boost the quality of the audio provided by the front panel header. This model has no integrated wireless interface to speak of, but there is scope for a user to install one due to removable notches on the rear panel IO shield. Touching on what the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 7 does have to offer from a networking perspective, there are two Ethernet ports with one controlled by a Realtek RTL8125AG 2.5 GbE NIC, with the other controlled by an Intel I219-V Gigabit NIC.

Users looking to make use of the onboard capabilities of Intel's integrated graphics, there are a pair of video outputs, a DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4. A total of six SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays are present, with a total of two PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots which each including its own individual M.2 heatsink to help keep the hot running NVMe drives cool. It should be noted that the M.2 slots share bandwidth with the SATA ports meaning that when a drive installed into either slot, it will automatically disable two SATA ports. Each of the PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots also includes support for Intel's Optane drives. The ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 7 also supports up to DDR4-4300 memory with the capability across its four slots to install up to 128 GB of system memory.

Test Bed

As per our testing policy, we take a high-end CPU suitable for the motherboard that was released during the socket’s initial launch, and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the processor maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance. While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS, and most users will fall back on JEDEC supported speeds - this includes home users as well as industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.

While we have been able to measure audio performance from previous Z370 motherboards, the task has been made even harder with the roll-out of the Z390 chipset and none of the boards tested so far has played ball. It seems all USB support for Windows 7 is now extinct so until we can find a reliable way of measuring audio performance on Windows 10 or until a workaround can be found, audio testing will have to be done at a later date.

Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives, in essence, an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, overriding memory sub-timings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.

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