Best Motherboard Sales for Black Friday & Cyber Monday (AMD AM4 Ryzen, Intel Z390)

We’ve covered a variety of sales this Black Friday, including a wide range of components like best monitor sales, best GPU and CPU sales, and an overall deal roundup. We’ve also written some guides that build upon a year of testing data, including our best CPUs of 2019, best cases of 2019, and best GPUs of 2019 round-ups.

Today, we’ll be focusing on the best motherboard discounts presently available on both Newegg and Amazon for both AMD and Intel. Remember, this isn’t a “best motherboard roundup,” but rather a best motherboard sales listing. You can reference our best Z390 boards video for Intel’s top-performing boards or our best motherboards for Ryzen 3000, and we have another of those on the way tonight. Every sale we list here is a motherboard that’s at least decent or recommended and that actually has a real discount, not just the fake markdowns that we see all the time. Some of these have individual reviews/analysis videos we’ve done that will be linked with them.

Best AMD AM4 Motherboard Sales for Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite: The Aorus Elite was one of our choices for a good budget Ryzen 3000 board, and that's amplified with the sale. It comes with a strong VRM for overclocking and was reviewed in a positive light from Buildzoid in our board analysis video. Black Friday sales bring the board to under the cost of an R5 3600 at the time of posting, which puts it at a very competitive price for the board. Remember that not everyone needs X570 -- its advantage is PCIe Gen4, but B450 and X470 are also worthwhile considerations for cheaper options that ditch Gen4.

MSI MEG X570 ACE via Newegg - ($300) ($50 sale + $20 rebate): The X570 Ace is a great choice for the higher-budget Ryzen 3000 motherboards and provides some features that the lower $200 range boards don’t. It’s great for test benches and overclocking with the start/reset buttons on the board, but troubleshooting is also made easier with a seven segment display for diagnosing errors. Buildzoid gave it a good review in our analysis video for it. The Ace is also used in our ultra high-end ~$2200 PC build that’s coming up shortly. 

MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon: This X470 board is one of our picks for a strong higher-end  board, and brings great overclocking performance for a lower price tag. In our testing, it was able to successfully OC the Ryzen 9 3900x, so it’ll be fine for any midrange or high end PC build. The Black Friday deal brings it even lower into the $150 range, which makes it a good pickup. 

MSI B450 Tomahawk Max: B450 can save a lot of money on builds, but you do obviously lose some of the features. For most users, B450 is fine. An R5 3600 would be well-suited with the MSI B450 Tomahawk Max, which has one of the best VRM setups on a B450 board while maintaining a price advantage. The B450 Tomahawk Max has been updated with a larger BIOS store to better accommodate the split between 2000 and 3000 series CPUs, so buying previous-gen CPUs on sale would also work for this motherboard. The B450 Tomahawk Max is our go-to B450 board at the price-point.

Best Intel Z390 Motherboard Sales

Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Ultra: The Ultra version of Gigabyte’s Aorus series received a reasonable discount this week, and is a good mid-to-high-end motherboard for Z390. The board comes with a strong and efficient VRM for overclocking. Buildzoid gave it a good review in our board analysis, and is a good consideration for 9900K builds.

ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming via Newegg ($179): The Z390 Phantom is one of the better Z390 boards on sale and was the recipient of our best mini-ITX board for Z390. The Z390 has an extremely efficient VRM, and a considerably strong VRM heatsink, neither of which is common on mini-ITX boards.

Editorial: Jake Henderson