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 Gaming M5
Another board currently in MSI’s Enthusiast Gaming lineup is the Z370 Gaming M5. Outside of size, the Gaming M5 is ATX versus the Godlike at E-ATX.
The overall theme on the board is a black PCB with a few grey highlights of components mixed in. The top half of the board should look pretty familiar when comparing the Gaming M5 to the Godlike Gaming flagship. While the shape of the shroud and VRM heatsinks are the same, the RGB LEDs inside on the Godlike were removed. It still carries over the fortified memory slots but loses some fan header connectivity as well as losing other RGB LEDs in that area. The PCIe area has a shroud between the slots and covers the audio portion of the board but it is not an extension of the back panel IO shroud. The PCH heatsink loses the GPU stand but keeps the same shape and RGB LEDs. Additional RGB strip support can be found through the RGB connector on the bottom of the board.
The four memory slots supports up to 64 GB in dual channel mode, with a supported speed up to DDR4-4000. There are a total of three full-length PCIe slots, the first two from the CPU using reinforced slots while the third is from the chipset. This allows for running in x16/x0/x4 or x8/x8/x4 configurations, and supports 3-way AMD Crossfire and 2-way NVIDIA SLI. Between the full-length slots are three x1 slots, getting their bandwidth from the chipset.
The board has the usual complement of six SATA ports all located on the right side of the board next to the chipset heatsink. As a side note, SATA 1/5 will be unavailable when an M.2 SATA SSD module has been installed in the first M.2 slot, while SATA 5/6 will be unavailable when an M.2 SATA SSD is used in the second M.2 slot. RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 are supported for all SATA devices. A total of six 4-pin fan headers are found in various locations throughout the board: four system fans, one water pump, and one CPU fan connector. The audio is handled by the latest Realtek ALC1220 codec along with Chemicon audio caps and the familiar audio separation line running splitting the audio section from the rest of the board, minimizing interference. A single Rivet Networks Killer E2500 gigabit Ethernet controller is found on the Gaming M5. The power, reset, and Game Boost knob are gone, however, a debug LED can still be found on the bottom of the board.
USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) is handled by the ASMedia 3142 controller and gives the board a Type-C and a Type-A port on the back panel IO. The chipset handles six USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) ports with two Type-A on the back panel and four more through internal USB connectors. There are three USB 2.0 ports on the back panel also, and four more through internal USB headers. The back panel also has a combination PS/2 connector, a CMOS reset button, DisplayPort and HDMI video outputs, the E2500 network port, and the audio stack with 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.