Analyzing Z370 for Intel's 8th Generation Coffee Lake: A Quick Look at 50+ Motherboards
by Ian Cutress, Anton Shilov, Joe Shields & Gavin Bonshor on October 20, 2017 2:00 PM ESTECS Z370 Lightsaber
ECS hasn’t had many boards to offer the enthusiast segment in a couple of generations, mostly focusing on the business class chipsets, like the H110 and B250. However they have continually released at least one 'enthusiast' class board per generation, more recently under the name of 'Lightsaber' or 'Claymore'. The Claymore didn’t make it to Z270, but the Lightsaber did, as well as a mITX board. With Z370 and Coffee Lake processors being released, ECS has announced their Z370-Lightsaber motherboard. This board, we are told, is targeted at gamers.
As far as looks go, the Z370 Lightsaber is fairly plain with a black PCB, black VRM heatsinks, and black and grey memory slots. There isn’t a shroud covering the rear panel, with the silver ports and the audio area in full view. The VRM heatsinks are connected via a heat pipe and look like they can do the job, with multiple rows of fins to increase surface area and aid in heat dissipation. The Lightsaber does have four RGB LED headers on the bottom which are adjustable through the BIOS, although no RGB LED elements present built into the board.
As with most ATX motherboards, we get four memory slots supporting up to 64GB in capacity, although ECS quotes the maximum supported memory speed as only DDR4-3200, compared to the DDR4-4000 range we are seeing on most other boards. The board does have three full-length PCIe slots, and three PCIe x1 for expansion. The board only supports AMD Crossfire and not NVIDIA SLI, and so the lane breakdown would be x16/x4 from the CPU for the two primary slots with the last slot being PCIe 3.0 x4 and fed from the chipset.
Storage options consist of two M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slots, with one of them supporting SATA as well. The top slot is able to hold 110mm drive while the bottom slot supports up to 80mm devices. The board comes with six SATA ports supporting RAID 0, 1,5, and 10, and has a total of five fan headers scattered around the board - one by the CPU area, another by the ATX 24 pin power connector, two across the bottom of the board, and one just below the left VRM heatsink. Audio duties are handled by the ALC1150 codec, which was last generation’s flagship model. The audio is not EMI shielded but does have independent power delivery to minimize any interference. Nichicon audio capacitors, as well as gold plated contacts round out the audio portion. The Lightsaber, a gaming-focused board, has chosen the Rivet Networks Killer E2500 network controller, and takes advantage of the network controlling features therein. The board comes with a three-digit debug LED (rather than a two-digit one) as well as onboard start/reset buttons. On the bottom of the board, there are buttons for one-touch overclocking, BIOS selection, BIOS updating, and a ROM backup button which should make backups and updates to the dual BIOS easier.
For USB connectivity, there is a total of 10 USB ports on the back panel. Two USB 3.1 (10 Gbps - only Type-A) from an ASMedia controller, four USB 3.1 (5 Gbps), and four USB 2.0. The back panel also has a single PS/2 port, a clear CMOS button, DisplayPort and HDMI video outputs, the Killer E2500 NIC, and the audio stack plus SPDIF (above the video outputs).
Pricing nor availability was listed for the ECS Z370-Sabertooth. The Z270 Lightsaber was released at $199 and due to the similarities between the boards, we expect this to be priced similarly.
| ECS Z370-Lightsaber | |
| Warranty Period | 3 Years |
| Product Page | Link |
| Price | N/A |
| Size | ATX |
| CPU Interface | LGA1151 |
| Chipset | Intel Z370 Express |
| Memory Slots (DDR4) | Four DDR4 Supporting 64GB Dual Channel Support DDR4 3200+ |
| Network Connectivity | 1 x Rivet Networks Killer E2500 LAN |
| Onboard Audio | Realtek ALC1150 |
| PCIe Slots for Graphics (from CPU) |
1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots @ x16 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots @ x4 |
| PCIe Slots for Other (from Chipset) |
1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots @ x4 3 x PCIe 3.0 x1 slots @ x1 |
| Onboard SATA | 6 x Supporting RAID 0/1/5/10 |
| Onboard SATA Express | None |
| Onboard M.2 | 2 x PCIe 3.0 x4 - NVMe or SATA |
| Onboard U.2 | None |
| USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) | 2 x Type-A 10Gbps (ASMedia) |
| USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) aka USB 3.0 |
4 x Rear Panel 1 x Header |
| USB 2.0 | 4 x Rear Panel 2 x Headers |
| Power Connectors | 1 x 24-pin EATX 1 x 8-pin ATX 12V |
| Fan Headers | 2 x CPU 2 x System 1 x Power |
| IO Panel | 1 x PS.2 keyboard/mouse port 1 x DisplayPort 1 x HDMI Port 2 x USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) ports (Type-A) 4 x USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) ports 4 x USB 2.0 1 x RJ-45 LAN Port 1 x Optical S/PDIF out 6 x Audio Jacks |
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carldon - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
Excellent summary and table in the last page. Good work!!!imaheadcase - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
I got a few questions:1. Why do they put USB 2.0 ports if USB 3.0 is backward compatible anyways? Why not just all USB 3.0 ports..it can't be price.
2. Why do they have such a vary in memory timings? For %99 of people memory timings are not really a big deal right? Maybe in old PC days it was.
3. Mini-ITX vs Micro-ITX..isn't it silly both exist in first place? Any reason for this..the diminsions are really close to the same. In fact, most Micro-ITX is simply removing lots of stuff from mobo that you really want to begin with.
lordsutch - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
I'd imagine they want to offer as many ports as they can without taking away too many PCIe lanes. The other option would be to embed a USB 3.x switch (or a PCIe switch) but of course now each port wouldn't simultaneously be able to operate at peak speed and 3.x switches are probably more expensive than USB 2 controllers.imaheadcase - Sunday, October 22, 2017 - link
Ahh didn't think about that aspect.DanNeely - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
Some USB audio and 2.4ghz wifi/bluetooth devices have had interference problems in 3.0 sockets. Dunno if they're fixed on new hardware (supposedly onboard hubs were a lot worse than chipset ports in this regard so room for QC to make it better); but even if they are there's going to be problems with once burned customers not trusting them.As pointed out elsewhere USB3 competes with PCIe lanes/SATA ports on the southbridge. Especially on full ATX boards if you go to max out the number of PCIe lanes to expansion slots and m.2 ports in addition to the lanes used on board for networking and audio you can get down to only a half dozen or so 3.0 lanes left from the chipset; but still able to hit 14 USB ports total by going USB2 with the rest.
People using older OSes (Windows 7 says hi) can't use USB3 ports to install the OS without jumping through a lot of hoops (the OS sees them as not USB2 and can't talk to them).
If any board size is at risk of going away it's probably full ATX; although for enthusiast sales I suspect it'll hold on better than mini ATX due to bigger is better irrationality.
MiniITX still has a decent capability gap vs mini ATX; but it's much smaller than it was a half dozen years ago when it only made sense if you were making a tiny box and were willing to accept major performance compromises to do so. Now as Mini ITX's capability continues to goes up and the need for expansion cards other than a single GPU goes down it's eating into an increasing chunk of Mini ATX's marketshare.
On the high side mainstream chips don't really have enough PCIe lanes to make good use of the extra 3 cards of space possible on the bigger boards/ Meanwhile multi-GPU gaming - the main reason an enthusiast would need a full size mobo is steadily going away (fewer games supporting it each year, no support for 3/4way at all in the newest cards from either company); and unless you need 2 GPUs + something else or extra space around the CPU for crazy OCing Mini ATX does almost everything that could be needed.
MadAd - Sunday, October 22, 2017 - link
> If any board size is at risk of going away it's probably full ATX; although for enthusiast sales I suspect it'll hold on better than mini ATX due to bigger is better irrationality.Irrationality indeed. I would have thought by now instead of a measly 5 mATX choices out of 50+ that it would be instead maybe 5 fullsize ATX with the main battleground being the two slot mATX market.
Its just laziness on the manufacturers side, with nobody steering the market to innovate on size. Theres nobody driving form factors, the CPU companies are present on all form factors so they dont need to drive change, the board partners are all set in their ways just slapping new images on mildly reworked designs so they dont have any need to innovate, weve seen video card manufacturers can shrink designs to better fit smaller factors but we still get chunky easy to produce cards for mainstream use as retooling would be an added cost, its just rolling train of new but nothing new generation after generation.
PC design is falling into mediocrity and I just wish the main players (intel+amd/board partners/nvidia+amd) would all get together to drive SFX/ITX and force retire ATX to the strictly enthusiast market, and maybe appeal to a more contemporary home user community (rather than just gamers which is where the marketing all seems to be these days) again too.
Liltorp - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
It is really true that the MSI PC Pro has a legacy PCI connector? I could use this for my TV tuner. But I thought PCI was not supported by newer boatds/CPU`s?Morawka - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
Has anyone noticed how cheap these new Z370 motherboards are? Most are under $180 and there are several sub $130.IGTrading - Sunday, October 22, 2017 - link
Tell this to the guys that already spent money on non-Z370 just a few months ago.Intel is already screwing them.
It would have been funny to sell a 250 USD motherboard to a 7700K buyer just last month, telling him his 250 USD are a good investment because of the good upgradeability.
Just 4 weeks later tell him: "Well ... Yeah ... About that upgrade ... It will cost you a minimum of 110 USD extra + the 360 USD for the new 8700 K.
775 was the last good & long lived platform from Intel.
edzieba - Sunday, October 22, 2017 - link
If people brought Z370 boards expecting them to support an additional CPU generation, they did it in spite of every Intel CPU release for the last decade: two CPU gens socket generation. There's no counter to ignoring the past.