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 K3
The Z370 AORUS Gaming K3 motherboard fits in towards the bottom of the Gaming motherboards but has many of the features users need to be a solid gaming motherboard. Gone is the Killer E2500 NIC and replaced with an Intel I219-V chip. The back panel I/O adds a DVI output for onboard video connection but removes the OC button found on the Gaming 3. RGB Fusion support is still here along with RGBW headers, as well as keeping two M.2 slots.
Between the Gaming 3 and K3 there are few design changes between them. The black PCB and Falcon make its appearance along with the four DIMM slots alternating red and black. The biggest design difference between the two is the lack of a shroud to cover the I/O area. This is a small cost saving measure at the expense of a clean look around back panel IO as well as the RGB LEDs being relegated to the audio separation line and the PCH heatsink. Additional RGB LED strips can be added using any of the four headers (2 RGBW, two digital) all controlled by the RGB Fusion software.
The four memory slots and DDR4-4000 memory support matches the Gaming 3, and a capacity of up to 64GB is supported. The PCIe slot configuration is also the same as the Gaming 3, with four PCIe 1x slots fed from the chipset, and two full length, fortified slots running at x16/x4 with the x4 coming from the chipset. We again see Crossfire support, but not NVIDIA SLI.
The board has six SATA ports, with four located to the right of the PCH heatsink, and two facing vertically just below it and to the right of the front panel headers. The two M.2 slots are also in the same location as the Gaming 3 and support the same size drives. These are located just above the top PCIe 1x slot and just above the bottom full-length PCIe slot. Onboard audio is still handled by the Realtek ALC1220 codec, is shielded for EMI, has audio separation from the rest of the board, and uses the WIMA and Nichicon audio caps. In a cost-saving measure, the board uses an Intel-based NIC instead of the Killer Networks E2500 found on the Gaming 3. WiFi is not found on this board either. Thunderbolt 3 support is handled with an add-in card as well.
USB connectivity is a bit different here, at least on the USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) side. There are a total of eight possible USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) ports from four on the back panel and four available through internal USB headers. For USB2.0/1.1 there are six in total with two ports on the back panel and 4 ports available through the internal USB headers. The ASMedia 3142 controller handles the USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) Type-C and Type-A(red) ports found on the back panel. The back panel IO has a single PS/2 port, removes the OC button, and adds a DVI port. The audio stack does not have SPDIF.
The Z370 AORUS Gaming K3 has a few cost-saving measures compared to the Gaming 3 such as swapping the Killer NIC for Intel, and removing the back panel IO shroud, and secures its place a bit lower in the product stack. While fully featured, the lack of SLI support will have those with multiple NVIDIA GPUs looking at other products in the stack for the necessary support.
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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.