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 Krait Gaming
The next board in the Performance Gaming line is the Z370 Krait Gaming. What immediately jumps out to me is the difference in style compared to the previous boards: gone are the more flashy shrouds and heatsinks, replaced with a basic rectangle shaped shroud and more simple chipset heatsink, albeit with dragon scale motifs on the board and heatsinks.
The Z370 Krait gaming motherboard uses an all-black PCB, with black aluminum VRM heatsinks, two reinforced PCIe slots along with two of the four memory slots in white. The motherboard has white stenciling around the board for styling accents which touch the VRM heatsinks, back panel shroud, and across the bottom of the board, mirroring one of the features of Krait Gaming boards in the past: a pure black and white base design. The PCH heatsink is the first to display the MSI Gaming Dragon, and moves the RGB LEDs to the base of the heatsink, which defaults to a white color. The remaining RGB LEDs are on the back of the board and the audio separation strip, and users are able to add an RGB strip using the RGB LED connector on board.
The memory support is up to 64 GB, with memory speeds up to DDR4-4000. The Krait Gaming uses double-sided memory slots to aid in securing the memory, and based on the cost of the board, do not use any enhanced reinforcement.
The same PCIe configuration, both physical and electrical, on the Gaming Pro Carbon AC is found here with three full-length slots (two using the Steel Armor), and three PCIe x1 slots. The lane breakdown is the same with x16 and x8 speeds from the CPU in the first two slots while the third PCIe slot runs at x4 and gets its lanes from the chipset. The board supports 2-way SLI from NVIDIA and 3-way Crossfire from AMD.
For storage connectivity, the Krait Gaming uses the six SATA ports from the chipset. Two M.2 slots, both supporting PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA, are found above the first and third PCIe slots but forgo any additional M.2 cooling. The top M.2 slot holds up to a 110mm module while the bottom can hold up to 80mm. This board also comes bundled with a U.2 Host Card, allowing for a U.2 SSD to be used connected to one of the M.2 slots.
For cooling, the board has six 4-pin fan headers, which allow for voltage or PWM control, scattered around the board. Audio is handled by the EMI shielded Realtek ALC1220 codec with Chemicon audio capacitors and has a dedicated headphone amplifier. MSI’s Nahimic2+ software, as part of MSI's audio software licensing strategy, is able to manipulate the sound to user preferences. The Intel I219-V network controller is in play here, with software-based bandwidth management.
USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) comes from the ASMedia 3142 controller with one Type-C and one Type-A on the rear panel. Four USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) ports and two USB 2.0 ports are the back panel, with two headers for each on the board. The back panel also contains a combination PS/2 port, DVI-D and HDMI for video output, and the audio jacks with SPDIF.
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sor - Friday, October 20, 2017 - link
Damn. At least key it differently and call it LGA1151v2 or something.The changes are so minimal it really does seem like planned obsolescence. Does it really need more power pins to support new chips with the same power envelopes? Really? They couldn’t handle that on the CPU PCB?
KaarlisK - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
Actually it is ~1.5 times peak current with the same average power envelope, so yes, they need the change.If they had not brought the launch forward and just launched together with the cheap chipsets, there would be far less complaints.
sor - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
Where did you find information indicating current has increased 50%? I just spent about ten minutes trying to find a reference backing that up, perhaps something indicating the 8 series operates at a much lower voltage within same TDP, which would translate to higher current but they seem to operate in the same 1.2-1.3v range.You’re not just assuming they draw more current because they have two more cores, are you?
KaarlisK - Sunday, October 22, 2017 - link
Notice the difference between average and peak.And the information is in publicly available documents. I did not bother to look it up, but others have, for example: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/intel-coffee-la...
Crono - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
Nice roundup. That's a lot of motherboards to spec and summarize. I especially appreciate the handy chart at the end, it's a good, quick-and-dirty comparison tool.Landcross - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
You guys forgot 2 new Z370 boards from Supermicro :)https://motherboarddb.com/motherboards/?chipset=19...
Xpl1c1t - Sunday, October 22, 2017 - link
The mITX board looks incredible.+ Low ESR Tantalum capacitors! (first time seeing them on VRM duty on a mainboard)
+ HDMI 2.0
+ 2x M.2 Slots
+ USB 3.1 Type C
+ Optical SPDIF
- RGB.......
MadAd - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
Great write up but for me its just another depressing generation of oversized, overpriced ATX form factor offerings on which the vast majority of users wont even plug a second gpu into, with the smaller and more size appropriate FF represented as a minority afterthought.With all the progress of PCs since the 90s whod have thought that I could still use the same ATX case today while every single other component (from floppy drives to 2d Mattrox cards) have long gone to the recyclers. I find it so annoying how manufacturers have stuck on this prehistoric gargantuan case size with the other sizes being an afterthought. It feels like like stifled innovation while everything else is moving on.
rocky12345 - Saturday, October 21, 2017 - link
Great article and a lot of work put in to get it out for us to read thank you.My only issue is and it is nit your fault is why these companies feel the need to totally blanket the market with basically the same boards just a different model number and basically a few tiny changes and spray paint it a different color and use the word gaming and put something x or x1 or k,k3 etc etc. For crap sakes just release three models not 7-10 models of the same crap it is pretty much just greed I guess.
The whole market is like this now with anything computer related of and if it has the words GAMING or RGB in it's got to be good for sure. My fav is that gaming mouse pad next it will have RGB lighting in it...lol
CitizenZer0 - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
Agreed