Z390 Express Socket LGA1151 manufactured by SuperMicro has been spotted on SiSoft Sandra benchmark. It is surprising to find indications of this chipset since its launch is scheduled for the second half of 2018, which indicates that Intel may be trying to accelerate its launch. According to the manufacturer’s official launch schedule, the Z390 Express chipset should be launched in the second half of next year, and would come after the H370 Express, B360 Express and H310 Express chipset that will arrive in the first half of 2018. This is the reason why it is strange to see already signs that there are already motherboards with the Z390 chipset, and not only because it seems too early because we should have seen something from the others before, since they will be launched to the market beforehand.
The Intel Z390 Express chipset adds some improvements to the existing platform (Z370) but nothing particularly substantial. Things like a programmable quad-core DSP audio processor or the SoundWire audio interface are fine, but they can not be considered important. There are other things that do have something more important, such as the integrated USB 3.1 controller, the WLAN controller 802.11ac integrated – yes, with an external PHY, SDIO controller for card readers also integrated, or compatibility with the new controller Thunderbolt 3.0 “Titan Ridge”. They are improvements to the platform that have more or less weight, but as we said nothing that has a real weight on the platform.
We’ll see anyway what happens in the end. Since the manufacturer of the plate is SuperMicro, a manufacturer that usually focuses on OEM and industrial systems rather than the general public, it is quite possible that it was simply an oversight by an Intel engineer who was doing the first tests and forgot to uncheck the option to upload the benchmark result directly to the database after the test.