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 ESTASRock Z370 Killer SLI and Killer SLI AC
The ASRock Z370 Extreme line consists of the Z370 Killer SLI/ac, Killer SLI, and the Extreme4. Both of the Killer SLI boards will be covered on this page as the only difference between the two is the wireless LAN which comes with the SLI/ac. Some of the differences between the Gaming line and the Extreme line are the power delivery, different controllers/caps/chokes, different heatsinks, and controller choice allowing for cost-saving efforts to keep the price to the consumer lower than the Gaming or Professional branded motherboards.
Both the Killer SLI and SLI/ac look exactly the same outside of the back panel IO where the ac model has the Intel Wi-Fi card out back. The shared board otherwise is an all-black affair, outside of some artwork on the PCB going through the socket area. The chipset heatsink is more of a simple rectangle on the Killer boards compared to the Gaming boards, and has RGB LEDs below it. An RGB header is located on the bottom of the boards for adding another LED strip. Shrouding covers the back panel and audio sections, while the last design aesthetic that sticks out is the two full-length reinforced PCIe slots.
The four memory slots support the platform maximum of 64 GB, with supported speeds up to DDR4-4266. That value is still faster than most boards covered in the roundup, but one notch below the high-end ASRock boards. There are two full-length reinforced slots fed from the CPU, capable of x16 and x8/x8 connectivity, and four x1 slots from the chipset. Both 2-way SLI and 3-way Crossfire are supported (as well as quad SLI/Crossfire with dual GPUs).
The Killer SLI and SLI/ac both include six SATA ports supporting RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. Additional storage is handled by two M.2 slots; the first is located above the top full-length PCIe slot and supports drives up to 80mm, while the second is located towards the bottom of the board below the chipset heatsink and supports drives up to 110mm. Be aware of slot sharing; if the first M.2 slot is occupied by a SATA device, SATA5 will be disabled, while if the second M.2 slot is occupied by a SATA module, SATA0 will be disabled.
Fan control is handled through the BIOS or via the F-Stream software, and gives control to all the fan headers: a CPU fan header (1A/12W), two chassis Fan headers, and a chassis optional/water pump header (1.5A/18W). Audio duties are handled by the last generation ALC892 codec, but is upgraded with the use of Nichicon Gold series audio caps. Network connectivity is handled by a single Intel I219-V on both boards with the SLI/ac adding the Intel Wi-Fi module for wireless support. The online specifications do not state which Wi-Fi module this is, although it is likely to be the AC3165.
USB connectivity is the same on both boards with neither utilizing the USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) controllers. On the back panel there are five USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) ports and one Type-C port. Additionally, there are two internal USB 2.0 headers supporting four ports, and another internal USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) header yielding two more ports. All USB ports are handled by the chipset. The back panel IO also has two video outputs with an HDMI and DVI-D port, as well as a 5 plug audio stack plus SPDIF. The Killer SLI/ac is the one with the Intel Wi-Fi antenna ports out back as well.
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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.