Upgrading from z370 to z490?

[e-troc]

I was really hoping for a M1 Max Mac mini Maybe next year....

Yeah, I am a bit mad about Apple spoiling the Hackintosh fun, but at least they are doing it by moving to an exciting and forward-thinking architecture. I’ll happily make the move at some point. My collegues who already got the new MBPs are raving about them.

 

[Middleman]

Yeah, I am a bit mad about Apple spoiling the Hackintosh fun, but at least they are doing it by moving to an exciting and forward-thinking architecture. I’ll happily make the move at some point. My collegues who already got the new MBPs are raving about them.

I would say the Z490 is a great system, but with the extra new features of the Alder Lake platform such as faster PCIe 5.0 and DDR5/TB4 wouldn't you be wanting to go for that instead? There's also the future-proofing on the PC side by going with Intel. As it goes I am very happy with Alder Lake. My Asus Prime P D4 board is working super fast and smooth and everything on it works so far. I would say it is the best hackintosh I have yet built - it's super fast and super easy to upgrade the parts (SSD, RAM, GPU cards etc). I highly recommend it.

 

[e-troc]

I would say the Z490 is a great system, but with the extra new features of the Alder Lake platform such as faster PCIe 5.0 and DDR5/TB4 wouldn't you be wanting to go for that instead? There's also the future-proofing on the PC side by going with Intel. As it goes I am very happy with Alder Lake. My Asus Prime P D4 board is working super fast and smooth and everything on it works so far. I would say it is the best hackintosh I have yet built - it's super fast and super easy to upgrade the parts (SSD, RAM, GPU cards etc). I highly recommend it.

Good points and appreciate the input! However, DDR5 is expensive, and I don't really have real-world use for PCIe 5.0. TB4 might become interesting for compatibility down the road but since my audio interfaces rely on ethernet I doubt it will really matter for me personally. I am not going to use the system as a Windows PC either, I am committed to macOS 100%. It's not like getting the latest and greatest does not tempt me, but it would mean buying more components than just the board and CPU, which is a big plus on the Z490 side.

 

[etorix]

"Future-proofing" a macOS system means buying Apple Silicon at this stage.
No-one has a use for PCIe 5.0 at this stage, and DDR5 will be best bought one year from now, when supply is better and prices maybe a little bit more reasonable.

Going Ice Lake may be unsexy, but it is still the reasonable choice for a production system.

 

[Jamesbond007]

I would say the Z490 is a great system, but with the extra new features of the Alder Lake platform such as faster PCIe 5.0 and DDR5/TB4 wouldn't you be wanting to go for that instead? There's also the future-proofing on the PC side by going with Intel. As it goes I am very happy with Alder Lake. My Asus Prime P D4 board is working super fast and smooth and everything on it works so far. I would say it is the best hackintosh I have yet built - it's super fast and super easy to upgrade the parts (SSD, RAM, GPU cards etc). I highly recommend it.

PCIe 5? Nothing uses it at this point. I certainly don't have any device that can use it.

DDR5? Still unavailable so far (at least in my location), and prices are very expensive. No point in acquiring them now. May be a long time later. (And if I am not mistaken your own motherboard uses DDR4 and not DDR5.)

Thunderbolt 4? If you have hardware that can fully use it, good for you. I certainly don't.

The only significant advantage (besides performance, but it still operates hot especially compared to Ryzen) as far as I can see is the chipset. It seems to offer many more PCIe lanes so that you can now install multiple M.2 drives on the motherboard WITHOUT the need to disable other peripherals like SATA ports. Nice. But I think this capability should have been introduced earlier.

If you want to tinker (as you seems to be since you have this and another unsupported Ryzen system) then good for you. But I still don't agree going with an unsupported platform on a production system.