The Biostar Racing Z490GTN Review: $200 for Comet Lake mini-ITX

Biostar Racing Z490GTN Conclusion

We’ve had some great successes over the years with Biostar’s mini-ITX GTN line of motherboards. Every so often we will find a diamond in the rough – a board with good performance and good value for the market that it targets. The mini-ITX motherboard often has to play somewhat safe, given that the market for these boards isn’t as large as the ATX-size market, but also there are both the budget and enthusiast gamers either looking for a cost down option or an optimized low volume small form factor design. Unfortunately Biostar’s Z490GTN is not a diamond in the rough, and comes across as a motherboard that is hard to recommend, especially at the $200 price point.

On the face of it, the board is innocent enough. The subdued neutral color design makes it look good for a non-RGB build, and some of the connector placement, such as the 8-pin 12V CPU power connector and the SATA ports, make a lot of sense where other motherboards in this size have fallen down. There’s PCIe protection, Intel gigabit Ethernet, and even support for legacy devices such as PS/2.

However for the most part there’s nothing special here. The audio chip is a bargain basement ALC892 design, when in this price bracket we should be seeing the ALC1150 or ALC1200. There are no USB Type-C ports, no USB 3.2 Gen2 (10 Gbps) ports, and while there is a space for a Wi-Fi add-in card, it doesn’t come with the system, and for a mini-ITX at $200, it really should.

To give Biostar some kudos, the board does well in our power tests, scoring the lowest value in idle. This should be a factor in most of the mini-ITX motherboards in the market, just for the sake of having ‘less stuff’ on a smaller PCB.

Overclocked i7-10700K to 5.1 GHz

However the thermal performance is where we see issues. The system doesn’t overclock as well as our others, and when placed at 5.1 GHz, the VRM temperatures go above 85ºC. That’s ok, because the CPU is at 99ºC under load and starts to throttle. Compared to the other systems we’ve tested, this is outright abysmal. The benefits of the Z490 chipset are meant to include USB 3.2 Gen2, which isn’t used here, and the ability to overclock, but even with the 8-core CPU (let alone the 10-core CPU), it won’t push as high as the others. Even when in a stable mode, the temperatures balloon past everything else we’ve tested to date. Users who want to go this route will need some super airflow - our tests were in a good airflow case as well.

In short, for $200, we can’t recommend the Biostar Z490GTN. It has some good qualities, but the feature set isn’t competitive for the price, and the performance with an overclocked CPU isn’t there. It might be best partnered with a Core i5-10400 or something similar, but then $200 comes across as too expensive, especially when vital features like overclocking are lost. Users should look at active cooling that also directs airflow over the power delivery, even for the mid-range CPUs.