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 ESTASUS TUF Z370-PRO Gaming & Z370-PLUS Gaming
In a courageous marketing twist, the next two boards from ASUS for launch hail from its TUF range of boards. The twist comes in the styling, with the brand feeding off of the yellow U in TUF and making that one of the style elements. Interesting it seems like the usual 5-year warranty from TUF boards is down to three years, although this may also be region dependent. Another change from previous TUF models is their segmentation in the market - normally these boards would command a price premium due to the higher warranty and thermal armor protection, but on these models ASUS has ditched this and changed focus to the budget and the gaming side of the market. Apparently, everything has to say 'Gaming'.
The TUF Z370-PRO Gaming and Z370-PLUS Gaming are almost identical, with minor technical and visual tweaks. On the visual side, while the Z370-PRO Gaming has a minor glowing LED strip on the right of the board, the Z370-PLUS Gaming offers RGB lighting in the same area. on the right-hand side of the motherboard, but that’s as far as it goes. An additional RGB strip header is featured on the TUF Z370-PLUS allowing for use with ASUS AURA SYNC compatible strips currently on the market. Both boards feature a black and yellow/orange contrast throughout the PCB.
A technical difference comes in the way of PCIe slots; the PRO-Gaming has a total of three full-length PCIe x16 with the top slot featuring SafeSlot metal reinforcement, but the bottom slot runs takes its lanes directly from the chipset, as opposed to the CPU. The Z370-PLUS Gaming has the same SafeSlot protection on the top slot, but omits the third and bottom full-length PCIe x16 slot, instead offering four PCIe x1 slots rather than three. Both boards have support for SLI and Crossfire setups. Storage wise, both boards have six SATA ports as well dual M.2 ports capable of powering PCIe 3.0 x4 SSDs.
Neither board comes with any Wi-Fi capabilities, but they do follow suit with the entirety of the Strix Z370 range and offer a single LAN port via an Intel I219-V gigabit network chip. For audio, ASUS is using the Realtek ALC887 codec rather than the ALC1220 found on the other boards, likely due to pricing. Both boards include a full complement of memory slots, support for DDR4-3866, and support for up to 64GB of UDIMMs - values typical for ATX boards in this end of the stack.
TUF Z370-Pro Gaming
Two USB 3.1 10Gbps ports are featured on both of the models, along with four USB 3.1 5 Gbps and two USB 2.0 ports. The rear I/O on the TUF Z370-PLUS Gaming includes a single USB 3.1 5 Gbps Type-C port, in exchange for two of the Type-A ports. Both boards have additional USB real estate via two USB 3.1 5 Gbps headers and two USB 2.0 headers. Both of the budget gaming targeted models omit DisplayPort in favor of a single DVI-D port, but HDMI is also present on both boards. Rounding off the rear I/O of both boards are a set of Realtek ALC887 controlled 3.5mm audio jacks and a single digital S/PDIF output, as well as the network port and combo PS/2 ports.
TUF Z370-Plus Gaming
Dotted around the boards are fan headers, with the Pro Gaming having four headers total with a single AIO CPU cooling header, while the Plus Gaming only has three but one of them is a dedicated water cooling pump header.
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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.