With a little more budget, you can get some really nice boards for up around $200. From day one, a stand out which we featured in our early 10th-gen coverage is the MSI MAG Z490 Tomahawk, it's a great quality motherboard priced at $190. In our testing, the Z490 Tomahawk peaked at just 74 degrees running a Core i9-10900K clocked at 5.1 GHz using 1.35v, so you don't need to spend big money to get the most out of Intel's new 10-core processor, despite the fact that it is extremely power hungry when overclocked.
MSI has gone with a dozen powerstages for the vcore VRM on the Tomahawk, using a dozen 55A powerstages for a combined 660A capacity. MSI also includes massive heatsinks which weigh a combined 393 grams. For comparison, the MSI Z490-A Pro comes with 237 grams worth of heatsinks. You also get some nice features such as 2.5 Gbit LAN, USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 for 20 Gbps support and a few extra USB ports when compared to the cheaper boards.
Our alternative pick, the Gigabyte Z490 Vision G might be worth considering over the Tomahawk for two reasons: at $200, it's the only Z490 board in this price range to offer three full length PCIe x16 slots, though only the primary slot is wired for full x16 bandwidth as LGA1200 processors don't support enough PCIe lanes. The secondary slot is wired for x8 bandwidth and when in use will half the bandwidth available to the primary PCIe x16 slot. Then the third slot is wired for x4 bandwidth.
The Vision G also offers two extra USB 3.2 ports on the I/O panel, though it drops Gigabit networking while retaining 2.5 Gbit LAN. In terms of VRM performance the Vision G is roughly on par with the Tomahawk.
Also worthy of mention is the Gigabyte Z490 Aorus Elite. We have tested that board and it's very good, but at the same price as the Tomahawk we tend to prefer the MSI board. The same is true for the Asus TUF Gaming Z490-Plus, overall another good board.