ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming 9 Motherboard Review – Phantom Gaming Replaces The Iconic FATAL1TY Brand

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Intel has come a long way with their mainstream processor platform. The platform has largely seen stagnation in terms of core and thread count over many generations since the first Core series CPU that launched back in 2010 but last year brought a big change to the CPU giant. What seemed to be a generational core clock bump has now turned into a generational core count bump while keeping the clock speed improvements. The Coffee Lake-S 8th Generation family, was the first big core count jump on the mainstream 300 series platform. It was an opportunity for Intel to show that they don’t only hold the IPC or clock speed advantage on the mainstream segment but they can also offer good multi-threading CPU performance. While the jump to 6 cores and 12 threads was great, the competition was offering up to 8 cores and 16 threads on their mainstream platform

Intel is now unleashing their own 8 core parts with their new 9th Generation lineup, also known as the Coffee Lake Refresh. The interesting part is that while there is the famous Core i7 SKU with 8 cores, they are also launching their first mainstream Core i9 part with 8 cores. Both parts are very interesting in their own right and the price to performance difference is something which gamers have been looking forward to, especially when Intel is terming the Core i9 SKU as the best gaming processor on the planet, which is something I’d extensively be looking into in the performance benchmarks. At the same time as the CPUs launched, motherboard partners of Intel also released a wide range of Z390 chipset based products. These products range from budget to mainstream and go all the way to the high-end tier, offering diverse designs and features, aimed at overclockers, gamers and both.

Today, I will be taking a look a the flagship arrival in ASRock’s latest motherboard portfolio, the Z390 Phantom Gaming 9. The Phantom Gaming lineup was first introduced when ASRock launched their AMD based Radeon RX 500 series graphics cards but this gaming oriented lineup will now be replacing their iconic FATAL1TY brand. This high-end motherboard retails for $268.99 US and I am really interested in finding out how it performs next to the Z390 Taichi Ultimate which I reviewed a while back