I plan to purchase a motherboard based on Intel's Z790 chipset.
Consider mostly MSI or Asus (rather regular ones, not these fancy flashing gaming monsters)
And I don't want to shoot my foot with incompatibility/drivers problems.
I couldn't find reasonable information if this family is generally linux-friendly.
I saw on Ubuntu forum, that someone had a problem with wifi and bluetooth on MSI.
But I'd like to have both (and especially bluetooth) working.

Does anyone have any experience and can confirm that everything works or discourage me from going this path?

BTW: I generally stick on Debian Stable.

Z790 was introduced roughly 7 months before Bookworm, 3 months before Bookworm's version freeze, 1 month before Bookworm's original kernel release version. You should be able to expect good support from it soon if not already, if not from its kernel 6.1, which is the latest LTS, then from a newer bpo kernel. My newest is a B560, which was released 3 months after Bullseye. I have no regrets about it, but use neither BT nor Wifi. I wouldn't hesitate, and more likely make do with H770 or B760, if I was interested in new again already.

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Some thoughts:

- Any Z690 should have identical CPU support, performance, etc, and has been around somewhat longer, and may therefore be better supported (I'm not actually entirely clear what, if any, real differences exist between the two platforms other than the name either, and this wouldn't be the first time Intel has just re-branded a PCH to go along with a 'new' release). Basically I would look at all LGA 1700 options flatly, between W680, Z690, Z790, and whatever the coresponding H-series chipsets are, and find whatever has the combination of connectors, price, etc that you need.

- Can you get any insight into what specific WiFi/BT module a board you're looking at uses? On both of my Z590 boards that isn't actually a soldered-down chip, its a little carrier card on a CNVi slot, and my understanding is these get upgraded more slowly (that is, they re-use them from 'generation' to 'generation'); if that module doesn't play nicely with whatever you need, you could always add an alternative one via PCIe or USB - fortunately WiFi and Bluetooth are fairly common in that regard.

- I believe wired networking at least on 'typical' boards will probably be something like Intel I225 or I210, which are both well supported. I am less sure of the much more expensive boards that try to include 10GbE built-in, but I haven't seen a board exclusively offer this (so usually you will have some common Intel or Realtek NIC + exotic 10GbE).

Some stuff that isn't perhaps so great:
- RGB features may or may not work, if you care about this look into OpenRGB's documentation.

- Onboard audio seems to be going back to proprietary hell on newer boards - HDA codecs with normal 5.1 or 7.1 output jacks are becoming more rare, and now they tend to have 'built in USB audio' using more proprietary-seeming chipsets (like ALC4080) that in my experience don't play nice with linux (as in, no working audio). I ran into this with an Asus Z590 board and just gave up entirely on the onboard audio, and use an external (standards compliant) USB Audio device instead. The port selection on a lot of newer boards is also pretty lame compared to even a few years ago - I'm not sure what 'they' assume people are hooking up on average anymore (does everyone just use wireless?). I don't know if the driver situation for those oddball 'onboard USB' controllers has improved in newer kernel releases (some random web searching yields the answer of 'maybe' as of ~December 2022), but a proper USB Audio device is cheap, gives you options for whatever output you might need, and can be carried over to future systems as well. Or use HDMI/DP audio output alongside your video signal (a lot of monitors and TVs have audio extractors built-in, if not speakers themselves).

Overall, I wouldn't anticipate too many major problems - worst case you end up with a USB dongle or two that can be moved to other systems in the future.

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Many thanks for this comprehensive set of tips!

Yeah, You're probably right. I'm just lazy. I generally use my hardware for a long time and then switch to something brand new. Every time I'm switching, the world is different, I'm not
up-to-speed, so I choose something that is new, and close to the top (excluding insanely expensive fancy stuff). I have had i5-3550K on ASUS-P8Z77 for 10 years, and the thing that made me think about the change is the new RawTherapee which is completely unusable (and the previous version was very laggy and hard to use too).
Now I changed my mind a bit, and I think "B" chipset will be probably enough. The only reason for "Z" I could imagine is CPU overclocking and I've just realized that the last CPU, I bothered to overclock was Celeron 300A 25 years ago (damn! I'm so old!). The core requirement is support for 14-gen processor and DDR5 memory (which - I hope - will allow me to use it for another 7 years at least).

I see that MSI boards generally use Intel's Wifi and BT (they don't specify the exact chipset number), and (Intel® 2.5G LAN) or (Realtek® RTL8125BG 2.5G LAN) - depending on the model.
Currently, this one looks interesting to me;
https://storage-asset.msi.com/datash...-PLUS-WIFI.pdf
It's cheaper than:
https://storage-asset.msi.com/datash...790-P-WIFI.pdf
and both have regular audio jacks.

Hm... didn't think about this aspect yet.

Actually, I use one, for BT, but it is annoying when You pay for sth, hope for it, and it refuses to work...

I think, but am not certain, that on newer generations of PCHs there's also some differences in total I/O capability (I think they give up some SATA ports or PCIe lanes), so something to look into, but yes I agree on the overclocking features being less of a selling point, especially with newer CPUs having automatic 'boost' features built-in.

Something else to note: the 14-gen CPUs are largely re-branded (and slightly improved via binning) 13-gen CPUs - it's all fairly fluid between the two branded generations. So it's all kind of fluid between the 600 and 700 series PCH + 13/14-gen CPU is basically my point.


I've had no problems with RTL8125-based PCIe cards, or with the Intel 225 2.5G LAN, fwiw. They've 'just worked' in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and higher.

One big difference I see in a quick glance is that B760 board doesn't appear to support PCIe Gen5, which the newer Intel CPUs do, while that Z790 board mentions support. I can't imagine this matters much today, but something to think about at least.


Oh I get it, just in the grand scheme of things if a USB dongle is the worst-case it isn't so bad, but yes ideally things would 'just work.' On both of those boards they don't specify exactly which chipset is used, but they do say 'HD Audio' so maybe they're going away from oddball stuff again - it seems to go in fits and starts.

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