Erik Pejka
22 de febrero de 2021
Great budget Z490 board from Amazon Warehouse
Originally I was going to purchase a B460 for my i7-10700 (non-K). However, I saw this on sale at Amazon Warehouse for $100. It was listed as "Used - Very Good", but I have heard great things about Amazon Warehouse, so I decided to try my luck. Later, it was discounted to $80, which is absolutely insane for a Z490 board. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't do price-matching with itself anymore, so I had to buy it again at the lower price and return the first one, but Amazon's return process through Kohl's is very easy and straightforward.When I opened the package, which was beat but not really damaged, the motherboard actually looked brand new to me. I don't think the anti-static packaging was ever opened, so the motherboard itself seemed to be in pristine condition: not a single scratch or fingerprint, and the CPU socket protector seems to have been untouched. All the accessories were included as well. If you told me that it was brand new, I would have absolutely believed you. If you've bought used hardware before, this is NOT what second-hand hardware looks like, no matter how well you clean it.Now onto the board itself. It is an entry-level Z490 board, so you should have your expectations in place.It's a solid budget board. The VRMs are pretty good, according to Hardware Unboxed. It does what a budget board does best, which is to be reliable and not get in the way of what you want to do. As it says in the specs, it has 4 RAM slots and Intel Gbe, which are both pretty good. It's got two PCIe x16 slots if you want to run dual graphics cards in 2021 for some reason. It has debug LEDs which is helpful in figuring out boot errors.There is only a single CPU fan header, although in the BIOS it seems that you can configure SYSFAN headers to be controlled by CPU temp, effectively making it a CPU header if you have a dual fan CPU cooler with no Y-splitter. Finally, I couldn't get it to boot with the first PCIe x16 slot, and needed to use integrated graphics for the first boot for some reason. I'm not sure why this is, but if you have an -F suffix CPU, this might be a problem (although I am not totally sure why this was an issue on my board in the first place).Ver másVer menos
1 persona la encontró útil
