My Radeon VII is from PowerColor. But all Radeon VIIs are the same. All are reference cards.
My Z390 motherboard is the Gigabyte Z390 M Gaming (rev. 1). I needed to stick to the mATX form factor and, on paper, this motherboard seemed to be the best.
Here are some of my observations and opinions of this motherboard, so far:
NVRAM
- While the motherboard itself is really, really good, the fact that there's no NVRAM support means that it does not run macOS nearly as well as the Asus Z370G Gaming.
- Booting in to macOS is inconsistent. Depending on the Aptio fix that is used, sometimes, booting will result in an error during the boot process and will stop around the "End random seed" portion of the boot process. When this happens, I have to press the reset button to restart the boot process.
- Other than the Aptio fix, my standard EFI folder (as found on post #1) works fine without any changes. I still have not been able to successfully boot the Gigabyte motherboard using OpenCore.
VRM, Overclocking, and Power consumption
- Overclocking my i9-9900K is vastly different between the two motherboards. On the Asus, I needed 1.320v to get a stable 5.0GHz all core overclock. On the Gigabyte, I only need 1.235v. These are the voltages needed to pass two hours of Prime95 testing. I assume the disparity is due to the the differences in VRM because everything else was the same, i.e. power supply, CPU cooler, etc. The Gigabyte seems to handle the overclock much more gracefully.
- I can't seem to be able to configure the BIOS to make the chassis fans run at full speed when the CPU is under heavy load (Prime95). This results in the CPU temp topping out at 90C vs ~84C on the Asus. However, the fans remain nearly inaudible to me while, on the Asus, I can clearly hear the movement of a lot of air.
- Power consumption is much lower with the Gigabyte. With pretty much the same hardware (same number of drives, PCI-e cards, etc.) the Gigabyte consumes much less power at idle. Approx 75-77W vs 95-108W. When testing Prime95, total system power draw was under 300W while the Asus was ~20W higher.
Other anomalies
- The Gigabyte motherboard won't even post when my 10GBase-T PCI-e card is installed but system sleeps and wakes fine with the Radeon VII.
- The Asus can not wake with the Radeon VII installed. This is true for both Windows and macOS. However, it boots fine with the 10GBase-T PCI-e card installed... Go figure...
- I have installed a Titan Ridge Thunderbolt card in place of the 10GBase-T in to the Gigabyte, but I'm still awaiting delivery of my first Thunderbolt accessory to see if it's working right. Right now, on System Information, Thunderbolt appears to be working...
- When sleeping, the Gigabyte motherboard does not pulse the power light on the computer case.
- Usage of the second M.2 NVMe SSD slot will disable one of the SATA ports. I do not remember seeing this mentioned on the Gigabyte website when I was shopping for motherboards.
So, in conclusion, I still feel, if macOS is your primary operating system, Z370 is the better choice. It's unfortunate that the Radeon VII didn't work right on my Z370G Gaming because macOS ran so well on it whether I used Clover or OpenCore.
There are more compromises when using macOS on this Gigabyte motherboard. None of them real deal breakers, more like annoyances. On the other hand, it's considerably more power efficient than the Asus and performance is really great.
I guess it can best be described as... My Asus felt almost like it was designed to run macOS, whereas, the Gigabyte requires more hacking and still isn't quite as compatible...