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 ESTASRock Z370 Extreme4
The ASRock Extreme4 is the flagship in the Extreme lineup, offering some of the same features as the Fatal1ty Gaming line. It uses the same flavor of power delivery with 60A chokes, Nichicon Combo caps, and Dual-Stack MOSFETs. What is missing on the overclocking front is the Hyper BCLK generator, so the range in which one can adjust the BCLK may not be as wide. This shouldn’t be a big issue for most considering the unlocked CPUs which will likely find their way into this socket.
The Z370 Extreme4 uses an all-black PCB with a few ‘racing’ stripes running through the board from the top left to the bottom right through the PCIe area and chipset heatsink. The Extreme4 uses the same shape and style VRM heatsinks found on the high-end boards, albeit without a heatpipe connecting them. The same style shrouding over the back panel and audio section is carried over from the flagship, and contains RGB LED features as well. The chipset heatsink is different, a bit more basic, and has RGB LEDs underneath. All the RGB LEDs, including the RGB header, can be controlled with ASRock RGB LED software.
Supported memory speeds on the Extreme4 reach up to DDR4-4333, with up to a 64 GB capacity. The top two slots are from the processor, and use reinforcement for holding heavy GPUs. The lane breakdown should be familiar with x16 cards single and x8/x8 in dual mode, while the final non-reinforced full-length PCIe slot has an additional PCIe x4 bandwidth from the chipset. There are also three x1 slots from the chipset.
Eight SATA ports are found on the board, with six using the chipset and another two using the ASM1061 (which uses a chipset PCIe x1 connection to create the two additional SATA ports). Two M.2 slots are found on the board with the top supporting up to an 80mm drive and the bottom supports 110mm drives. Lane sharing is required here when SATA drives are in play, with SATA ports 0/1 disabled when the first M.2 slot is used and the SATA 4/5 ports are disabled when the second M.2 slot is used.
Fan control is handled through the BIOS or via the F-Stream software, and it gives control to all the 4-pin headers: A CPU fan header (1A/12W), 2 chassis fan headers, and a chassis optional/water pump header (1.5A/18W). Audio duties are taken by the latest ALC1220 codec, which uses Nichicon Gold series audio caps, a Texas Instruments NE5532 headset amplifier, and the whole audio subsystem has PCB separation of the audio components from the rest of the board. Network functionality is handled by a single Intel I219-V network controller.
There are two USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) Type-A and Type-C ports on the rear panel via an ASM3142 controller, and four USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) ports fed from the chipset. Internally there are an additional three headers for USB 2.0 providing 6 ports, and two headers for USB 3.1 5Gbps support driven by the chipset or ASM1074 hub. There is also an additional new generation USB header, but this looks like it is only at 5 Gbps. The rest of the back panel consists of space for a Wi-Fi antenna in the E-key space, a combination PS/2 port, D-Sub, DVI-D, and HDMI ports for video output, and the 5 plug plus SPDIF audio stack.
| ASRock Z370 Extreme4 | |
| Warranty Period | 3 Years |
| Product Page | Link |
| Price | Amazon US |
| Size | ATX |
| CPU Interface | LGA1151 |
| Chipset | Intel Z370 Express |
| Memory Slots (DDR4) | Four DDR4 Supporting 64GB Dual Channel Support DDR4 4333+ |
| Network Connectivity | 1 x Intel I219-V GbE |
| Onboard Audio | Realtek ALC1220 |
| PCIe Slots for Graphics (from CPU) | 2 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots @ x16 or x8/x8 |
| PCIe Slots for Other (from Chipset) | 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots @ x4 3 x PCIe 3.0 x1 slots |
| Onboard SATA | 6 x Chipset 2 x ASM1061) |
| Onboard SATA Express | None |
| Onboard M.2 | 3 x PCIe 3.0 x4 - NVMe or SATA |
| Onboard U.2 | N/A |
| USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) | 1 x Type-C (ASMedia) 1 x Type-A (ASMedia) |
| USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) | 4 x Rear Panel 1 x Header 1 x ASM1074 Header |
| USB 2.0 | 3 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 (1.5A/18W) 2 x 4-pin Chassis Fan 1 x Chassis Optional/Water Pump (1.5A/18W) |
| IO Panel | 2 x Wi-Fi Antenna ports 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port 1 x HDMI port 1 x D-Sub port 1 x DVI-D port 1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port 1 x USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) Type-C 1 x USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) Type-A 4 x USB 3.1 (5 Gbps) Type-A ports 1 x LAN (RJ45) ports 1 x Optical S/PDIF out 5 x Audio Jacks |
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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.