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 ESTMSI Z370 Tomahawk
The MSI Z370 Tomahawk positions itself as a mid-range gaming board from the 'Arsenal Gaming' lineup (boards that have weapon-based names). The Arsenal lineup, like the Performance and the Enthusiast lines, is aimed towards hardcore gamers, including eSports participants. As such, the boards in this category are tested to go through 24 hours of testing both offline and online gaming by eSports players. Obviously, not all boards are tested in this way, but likely a few were before mass production (though to be honest, if they fail that test, there are serious issues wrong).
The look of the Tomahawk differs from the Enthusiast gaming series boards from MSI. Both use a black PCB, but the VRM heatsinks on the Tomahawk are redesigned and looks to be a bit smaller. The shroud for the back panel looks different as well, going for a more military look. The PCH heatsink is styled differently, similar to an SLI HB bridge even though this board does not support SLI, and has the MSI name in the middle with an LED illuminating the heatsink. The remaining RGB LEDs are on the audio separation line and the back of the board, giving it more of a backlit glow when inside of a case. There is also some gray stenciling on the board. If more RGB LEDs are in the future, the Tomahawk does have one additional RGB LED connector. Of the three PCIe slots, the first one for graphics cards is steel reinforced.
The memory capacity across the four memory slots sits at 64GB, while speeds on the Tomahawk are rated up to DDR4-4000 through MSI’s DDR4 Boost. There are a total of three full-length PCIe slots, with the first one being fortified by MSI’s Steel Armor and coming from the processor. The other two are x4 and x1 slots from the chipset, and between the three full-length slots are another three PCIe x1 slots powered by the chipset.
The Tomahawk includes six SATA ports supporting RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. The ports are all located to the right of the chipset and face the edge of the board. The board has two M.2 slots, with the first above the top PCIe slot and able to hold up to a 110mm drive. The 2nd M.2 slot is mounted between the two full-length black PCIe slots and holds up to an 80mm drive. A total of six fan connectors can be found on the board around the CPU socket, two in the upper right-hand corner, a couple on the bottom of the board, and another below the VRM heatsink on the left side. Audio duties are handled by the older Realtek ALC9892 codec, which uses Chemicon audio capacitors. The audio chipset itself does not appear to be EMI shielded, however there is board separation between the analog and digital parts of the system. A single Intel I219-V gigabit Ethernet controller is also present.
Support for USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) comes from the ASMedia ASM3142 controller and gives one Type-C port and one Type-A port, both located on the back panel. Four USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) ports and two USB 2.0 ports are also on the back panel, with two headers of each type on the board. The remainder of the back panel consists of a PS/2 port, DVI-D and HDMI video outputs, the Intel network controller, and an audio jacks plus SPDIF.
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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.