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 Z370M Gaming Pro AC
On the Micro-ATX side of things, MSI is bringing two boards to market. The first is the Z370M Gaming Pro AC from the Performance Gaming series.
The Z370M Gaming Pro AC has a black PCB but does not have any added stenciling design on the board itself. The only initial color comes from the red LEDs (which are not RGB) located on the back of the PCB, although an RGB LED strip can be added via the onboard header. The power delivery heatsinks are designed to match the board aesthetic, but again have only a hint of a design on it. The back panel cover has the Gaming Pro name on it and what looks like vents on the inside portion. The chipset heatsink here is also quite small, has the MSI name on it with white accents, and is attached to the motherboard with screws rather than push-pins.
Memory support for the Z370M goes up to 64 GB capacity, with an on-the-box rated speed up to DDR4-4000. There is no memory slot reinforcement, however it does use a double-sided memory latches to secure the memory. The Z370M Gaming Pro AC is equipped with two full-length PCIe slots, for x16/0 or x8/x8 bandwidth from the processor, supporting 2-way SLI and Crossfire. There are also two additional PCIe x1 slots.
Due to the smaller board size, MSI has only placed four SATA ports from the chipset, and in this case all four ports are together in a typical horizontal location. There are two M.2 slots for additional storage, with both of the slots here supporting PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA drives - the top slot is good for 110mm drives, while the slot between the PCIe lanes is good for 80mm drives.
The Z370M Gaming Pro AC has a total of five 4-pin headers scattered around the board, three in and around the socket area with the other two on the bottom of the board - all the headers support both PWM and voltage control. Networking connections are handled by the Intel I219-V Gigabit controller, with the AC also having an Intel 802.11ac Wi-Fi module. Audio duties are processed by the latest Realtek ALC1220 codec, and we get some PCB separation for the codec to improve signal quality.
The Z370M Gaming Pro AC uses an ASMedia ASM3142 controller for its two USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) ports: one Type-A and one Type-C on the back panel, plus an additional onboard header. On the rear panel there are another four USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) ports, but no USB 2.0 ports. The remainder of the back panel IO has the Intel AC8265 Wi-Fi adapter, two PS/2 ports, DisplayPort and HDMI video outputs, the Intel I219-V network port, and the audio jacks from the ALC1220 plus SPDIF.
| MSI Z370M Gaming Pro AC | |
| Warranty Period | 3 Years |
| Product Page | Link |
| Price | Amazon US |
| Size | Micro-ATX |
| CPU Interface | LGA1151 |
| Chipset | Intel Z370 Express |
| Memory Slots (DDR4) | Four DDR4 Supporting 64GB Dual Channel Support DDR4 4000+ |
| Network Connectivity | 1 x Intel I219-V 1 x Intel AC8265 Wi-Fi + Bluetooth |
| Onboard Audio | Realtek ALC1220 |
| PCIe from CPU | 2 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots @ x16 / x8 |
| PCIe from Chipset | 2 x PCIe 3.0 x1 slots |
| Onboard SATA | 4 x Supporting RAID 0/1/5/10 |
| Onboard SATA Express | None |
| Onboard M.2 | 2 x PCIe 3.0 x4 - NVMe or SATA |
| Onboard U.2 | None |
| USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) | 1 x Rear Panel Type-C 1 x Rear Panel Type-A 1 x Onboard Header From ASMedia ASM3142 |
| USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) | 4 x Rear Panel 2 x Headers |
| USB 2.0 | 2 x Headers |
| Power Connectors | 1 x 24-pin EATX 1 x 8-pin ATX 12V |
| Fan Headers | 1 x 4-pin CPU 1 x 4-pin Waterpump 3 x 4-pin System Fan (All PWM or Voltage controlled) |
| IO Panel | 2 x Antenna connectors 1 x PS/2 keyboard 1 x PS/2 /mouse 1 x DisplayPort 1 x HDMI 1 x USB 3.1 Type-A 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C 4 x USB 3.1 Type-A (5 Gbps) 1 x LAN (RJ45) port 5 x Audio Jacks + SPDIF |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
83 Comments
View All Comments
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.