Having launched the majority of its Z390 consumer motherboards a few weeks ago, Gigabyte today brings us the Z390 Designare motherboard that caters to the needs of design professionals and content creators.

(Image credit: Gigabyte)

Gigabyte markets the Z390 Designare as a feature-packed motherboard that is more than ready to take on Intel's latest Core i9-9900K octa-core processor. The motherboard is built with a 2x copper PCB (printed circuit board) and has been outfitted with a pretty robust 12+1 phase digital power delivery subsystem. Power is supplied to the processor through an 8-pin EPS connector and a secondary 4-pin connector. The motherboard comes with four DDR4 memory slots allowing professionals to cram up to 64GB of memory into their systems. The motherboard is compatible with ECC (error checking and correcting) unbuffered DIMMs and DDR4 speeds up to 4,266MHz and higher.

There are plenty of storage options on the Gigabyte Z390 Designare. Prosumers have access to six SATA III connectors and two M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slots, both passively cooled with Gigabyte's M.2 Thermal Guard heat sink to prevent SSD throttling and bottlenecks. The motherboard is Intel Optane-ready and supports popular RAID configurations, such as RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.

On the expansion side of things, the Gigabyte Z390 Designare has been blessed with three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots reinforced with stainless steel and two PCIe 3.0 x1 slots. Therefore, the motherboard can host up to two Nvidia graphics card in a two-way SLI configuration or three AMD graphics card in a three-way CrossFire configuration. There is also a small M.2 socket 1 connector to house an Intel CNVi wireless module.

(Image credit: Gigabyte)

Being a motherboard that's tailored around professionals, the Gigabyte Z390 Designare features two high-speed Thunderbolt 3 ports, which opens the door for the use of two 4K displays simultaneously at 60 frames per second or a single 5K display. Additionally, professionals can daisy chain up to 12 Thunderbolt devices of any nature. One of the Gigabyte Z390 Designare's highlights is that it's the first motherboard of its kind to implement a DisplayPort input for an external graphics card. As a result, Nvidia GeForce RTX 20-series owners can connect the graphics card DisplayPort 1.4 output into the motherboard's Thunderbolt.

Connectivity on the Gigabyte Z390 Designare consists of a PS/2 keyboard and mouse combo port, DisplayPort in, HDMI 1.4 port, two USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two Thunderbolt 3 connectors (USB Type-C ports with USB 3.1 Gen 2 support), four USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports and two USB 2.0 ports. The motherboard also sports two Gigabit Ethernet ports and a WiFi 802.11ac Wave 2 and Bluetooth 5 combo. As for audio, it makes use of Realtek's ALC1220-VB codec and comes with five audio jacks and an optical S/PDIF out connector.

Gigabyte hasn't reveal the pricing and availability for the Z390 Designare.