Man of Honour
DrCheese, If you shop around like I did you can find the Pro for £15 less than the Elite is on here. At the time the place I got my Pro from was selling it for just a fiver more than they were selling the Elite so it was a no brainer. Now though they have dropped the Elite as well which is now a further £15 cheaper than they are selling the already heavily discounted Pro.
My 9600k, Samsung Evo 250gb NVME drive and Giagbyte Z390 Pro came this morning. I must say that the Pro is a very nice looking board with a lovely deep matt black pcb. The vrm heatsinks are chunky and going by the design should be very effective at cooling the chips. I am actually going to try the onboard audio before installing my Soundblaster Z and see how it compares. The only problem I may have is the fitted I/O shield. My pc is in my desk and the motherboard lies down horizontally. The way my cooling is set up is from the front of the board to the back (2x 200mm fans at each end) so the I/O shield may trap a pocket of heat under the shroud and prevent the lower vrm heatsink from cooling properly. If I remove the I/O shield the rear fan sits just behind the vrm heatsinks and will just suck the heat out but then the led in the shroud will be shining out of the rear. I guess I will try it with the I/O fitted and hope for the best because once it's built it will be too much hassle to take apart again due to hardline watercooling.
To give you a idea of what I am going on about this is how it's set up currently. That's looking down into my desk so the bottom is the front and the top is the rear. The vrm's will be air cooled on the Gigabyte so I need to make a new pipe from the pump to the gpu. Water cooling the vrm's was just to make routing the pipe from the pump to the gpu easier and the block only cost me £6 so it seemed like a good idea at the time.
My 9600k, Samsung Evo 250gb NVME drive and Giagbyte Z390 Pro came this morning. I must say that the Pro is a very nice looking board with a lovely deep matt black pcb. The vrm heatsinks are chunky and going by the design should be very effective at cooling the chips. I am actually going to try the onboard audio before installing my Soundblaster Z and see how it compares. The only problem I may have is the fitted I/O shield. My pc is in my desk and the motherboard lies down horizontally. The way my cooling is set up is from the front of the board to the back (2x 200mm fans at each end) so the I/O shield may trap a pocket of heat under the shroud and prevent the lower vrm heatsink from cooling properly. If I remove the I/O shield the rear fan sits just behind the vrm heatsinks and will just suck the heat out but then the led in the shroud will be shining out of the rear. I guess I will try it with the I/O fitted and hope for the best because once it's built it will be too much hassle to take apart again due to hardline watercooling.
To give you a idea of what I am going on about this is how it's set up currently. That's looking down into my desk so the bottom is the front and the top is the rear. The vrm's will be air cooled on the Gigabyte so I need to make a new pipe from the pump to the gpu. Water cooling the vrm's was just to make routing the pipe from the pump to the gpu easier and the block only cost me £6 so it seemed like a good idea at the time.
