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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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.