ASUS Z490 Comet Lake LGA1200 Motherboard Launch

Prime Z490-A and Z490-P are the core motherboard products and enjoy a good cross-section of main stream features to appeal to system builders.

ASUS Describes Prime as:

ASUS Prime series is expertly engineered to unleash the full potential of the 10th generation Intel Core processors.  Boasting a robust power design, comprehensive cooling solutions and intelligent tuning options, Prime Z490 series motherboards provide daily users and DIY PC builders a range of performance tuning options via intuitive software and firmware features.

Prime motherboards are intended to be the mainstream product offering and yet still provide excellent performance.  These motherboards feature a smaller 12+2 CPU VRM and some basic components for corporate living such as 2.5Gig Ethernet and Realtek S1220A 8-Channel audio. 

ASUS Prime Z490 motherboards are some of the few that come with onboard graphics supporting both HDMI 1.4 and DisplayPort.  Product colors are white and silver with basic heatsinks being used to keep everything cool.  While the intent isn’t to be an overclocking monster the boards still feature memory support up to 4600Mhz+ and offer AI Overclocking.

The ASUS ProArt Creator series takes a slightly different approach to motherboard design and favors features that content creators demand to make their workflows faster and more efficient.  I might consider these to be workstation class products while still offering some consumer grade features.

Target demographics include Graphic Artists, 3D Designers, Engineers and video professionals.  To support these users the boards are designed for Multi Graphic setups (Multi GPU) Fast Transcoding, high speed data transfers and easy optimization for performance and color rendering.

As gamers and hardware enthusiasts we often look for motherboards that supported more than one graphics card and, sadly, with the demise of SLI there is rarely a motherboard to support more than two graphics cards much less having more than two PCI Express 16x slots. 

The ProArt Z490 Creator 10G can support up to 3x PCI Express video cards and comes with a discrete 10G Ethernet card for some of the fastest network connections possible.  Aside from the change in PCI Express slot layout the hardware specs for the ProArt Z490 Creator 10G are very similar to what you would find with the ASUS Prime.