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 ESTGIGABYTE Z370 Gaming 3
The next board is the Z370 AORUS Gaming 3. This board purports to be on the middle of their Gaming series of motherboards and includes RGB Fusion, dual M.2 slots, a Killer E2500 Gaming LAN, the Ultra Durable feature set, and a different color scheme than the other boards in the gaming line.
The Z370 AORUS Gaming 3 uses a black PCB with the AORUS falcon stenciled in through the PCIe area. What is different here compared to some of the other gaming boards is that the reinforced PCIe slots are red instead of black. Instead of all black DIMM slots, two on this board are red; a departure from all black we have seen on the Gaming line previously. The DIMM slots on the Gaming 3 also do not have the strengthened slots. It uses the same chipset heatsink as the Ultra Gaming, and the heatsink is one of two places users will find RGB LEDs on the board. The other location is the audio separation line.
The Gaming 3 uses the platform standard four DIMM slots with speeds up to DDR4-4000 and capacity up to 64GB. The PCIe layout is different on this board compared to what we have looked at previously from GIGABYTE: on this board, there are only two full-length PCIe slots and four PCIe 1x slots. The full-length slots are reinforced (part of their ultra-durable features) and run in an x16/x4 configuration allowing AMD 2-Way Crossfire but not SLI as NVIDIA requires an x8 speed on the slot. That PCIe 3.0 x4 is powered by the chipset, similar to the Z370-P.
For SATA storage, there are six SATA ports, four of which are located on the right side of the board by the PCH, while the other two are found a towards the bottom right-hand corner in a vertical orientation. The two M.2 slots are located just above the top PCIe 1x slot and just above the second full-length PCIe slot. The top slot supports 110mm drives, while the bottom supports up to 80mm.
There are a total of five fan headers on the board. with the CPU and water cooling CPU fan headers by the socket, a system fan by the 8-pin EPS plug, a system fan to the right of the DIMM slots, and the last header is at the bottom of the board. If the lack of RGB LEDs on the board is a turn-off, there are RGBW headers found on the board (one across the bottom, the other by the 24-Pin ATX power connector). Onboard audio is handled by the EMI shielded Realtek ALC1220 codec and like most other gaming boards, uses the Nichicon and WIMA caps. The NIC of choice on this board is the Rivet Networks Killer E2500 and is the only network controller on the board. The Gaming 3 does not include WiFi. Thunderbolt 3 is supported on this board via AIC (Add-In Card).
USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) is handled by an ASMedia 3142 controller and gives us one Type-A and one Type-C adapter both found on the back panel I/O area. From the chipset is another Type-C internal header (5 Gbps), four USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) four ports on the back panel and two more through internal USB headers. There are two USB 2.0 ports on the back panel, and four more through internal USB headers. The remainder of the back panel I/O connectivity consists of a combo PS/2 port, a one-touch overclocking button, an HDMI output for using onboard video, and the audio stack (no SPDIF).
The Gaming 3 finds itself squarely in the middle of the GIGABYTE stack. The mix of features, such as the Killer Gaming NIC, an upgraded audio section, and reinforced slots keep gaming a priority on this board. However, the lack of SLI support will send those with multiple NVIDIA GPUs looking elsewhere.
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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.