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 WiFi (Wi-Fi)
Our next board in the GIGABYTE Z370 lineup is the Gaming WIFI. This board appears to find itself in the somewhere around the Gaming 3 and Gaming K3 in the product stack. The board uses the Creative Sound Core3D audio over the more traditional ALC1220 in a nod towards 'gaming'. As the name implies, the Gaming WIFI includes Intel WiFi in addition to the Intel NIC.
On the appearance side of things, the Gaming WIFI looks strikingly similar to the Gaming 3. The difference here is the removal of the red parts to black parts, such as the all-black DRAM slots and all-black PCIe slots. The only red remaining comes from the back panel IO shroud, and the WIMA caps in the audio section. Otherwise, its the same board, appearance wise, from the PCH heatsink to the AORUS Falcon prominently stenciled on the board. We get RGB LEDs on the heatsink and audio separation line, but also LEDs around the VRM area on the Gaming WIFI.
Memory support on this board is the same as the K3 and Gaming 3, supporting a capacity up to 64GB and speeds to DDR4-4000. The PCIe slot arrangement changes a bit and consists of two reinforced, CPU fed, full-length slots running at x16 and x8/x8, supporting AMD Crossfire and NVIDIA SLI, and another full-length slot running at x4 driven by the chipset PCIe lanes. Users will also see three PCIe 1x slots also fed from the chipset.
The board has six SATA ports, to the right of the PCH heatsink and parallel to the board. The M.2 slots are above the top PCIe 1x slot and the second is above the bottom, non-fortified full-length PCIe slot. They support drives in 110mm and 80mm length respectively. The Gaming WIFI has a total of five hybrid fan headers located around the board and can be controlled by the Smart Fan 5 application. Two RGBW headers and two digital LED headers are there to use if the included RGBs are not satisfactory. The onboard audio moves away from the Realtek ALC1220 codec and uses the Creative SOund Core3D audio, and has EMI shielding and uses Nichicon and WIMA audio caps. For networking, the Killer E2500 NIC found on the Gaming 3 is replaced by an Intel GbE LAN. This motherboard supports Thunderbolt 3 via an add-in card, and the connector for the card is located between the last full-length PCIe slot and the bottom 1x slot.
USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) duties are handled by an ASMedia 3142 controller giving Type-C and Type-A ports on the back panel IO. From the chipset, there are a total of 10 USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) ports with six on the back panel and another four available through the internal USB headers. Also sourced from the chipset are two USB 2.0/1.1 ports through internal USB headers. Additionally, the Gaming WIFI gains two more USB 2.0/1.1 ports through a Genesys Logic USB 2.0 hub and can be accessed through internal USB headers as well. The rest of the back panel IO consists of a combination PS/2 port, the Intel 3165 WiFi adapter, an HDMI output, and a gold plated audio stack including a SPDIF port.
The Gaming WIFI has an interesting set of features with the inclusion of Wi-Fi, and using the Creative Sound Core3D audio instead of the Realtek solution. This also gives users an option of using SPDIF which the Gaming 3 and K3 lack. Also supported is SLI.
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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.