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 Ultra Gaming
The next board we will take a high-level look at is the Z370 Ultra Gaming. The Ultra Gaming appears to fall somewhere in the middle of the AORUS lineup offering a mix of features.
Appearance wise, the PCB is black with the AORUS bird stenciled in from the Audio area going through the PCIe slots and ending around the bottom of the CPU socket. RGB LEDs are used in multiple locations including around the VRM area, between the memory slots, and a strip on the right side going from mid-board to the top. The separation line between the audio section and the rest of the motherboard has LEDs, as well as the two fortified PCIe slots and the PCH heatsink. Compared to the Gaming 5 and Gaming 7, it loses LEDs on the VRM heatsink and back panel shroud. On the board there are also two 5-pin headers for external RGBW LED strips, both supporting true white, and two more regular RGB headers, all of which are controlled by the RGB Fusion Software. The Ultra Gaming board uses a different VRM with what looks like 7 phases as opposed to the 10 phase the Gaming 5/7 runs with. We can see it is using International Rectifier chokes, likely to be the same 40A/50A models we have seen on other GIGABYTE boards. Two separate heatsinks cover each set of VRMs to help keep them cool.
The board uses four reinforced memory slots supporting dual-channel DDR4 with capacity up to 64GB, and speeds supported up to DDR-4000. There are two steel protected full-length PCIe 3.0 slots, operating at x16 and x8 respectively, using lanes sourced from the CPU. There is another unprotected full-length PCIe 3.0 slot at the bottom of the board; it is limited to x4 bandwidth from the chipset and used for add-on cards. Additionally, there are three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots to round out PCIe capabilities. The board supports 2-way SLI via the reinforced slots, and 3-Way Crossfire using all the full-length PCIe slots.
For storage, the Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming gives users a total of six SATA ports and two M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 slots. The first M.2 connector can hold up to 110mm drives and is located above all the PCIe slots. The second slot, found between the second PCIe x1 slot and second full-length slot, supports up to 80 mm drives. There are several fan headers scattered around the board, five according to my cursory glance, located around the socket and to the right, as well across the bottom of the board. Audio duties are handled by the latest Realtek ALC1220 codec while networking is taken care of by a single Intel I219-V NIC. The Ultra Gaming also includes a Thunderbolt 3 header located just above the SATA ports for a TB3 add-in card.
The board supports USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) with a Type-A and Type-C headers found on the rear I/O only. There is a USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) header for the chassis, although we find four ports on the rear panel. There is a USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) style header on the board as well, although from what we can determine, this has only 3.1 (5 Gbps) bandwidth.
Boards further up the stack like the Gaming 5 offer an additional M.2 slot, or in the case of the Gaming 7, the additional M.2 slot and better audio hardware. The Ultra Gaming does not have onboard power and reset buttons nor a debug LED - it would appear these are options commonly targeted towards enthusiasts. In that respect, the stripped down Ultra Gaming is focusing on users who set the system up, then leave it until it is time to upgrade.
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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.