The GIGABYTE B360 Gaming 3 WIFI Review: A Cheaper Alternative at $120
by Joe Shields on July 11, 2018 9:45 AM ESTVisual Inspection
The GIGABYTE B360 Gaming 3 WIFI isn't expected to turn heads on looks at this price point, yet it is also not always expected to be shoved inside a closed case either. To that end, the motherboard uses a dark brown, almost black PCB with brown traces running throughout the board. The now familiar AORUS bird is stenciled in prominently around the audio and PCIe area of the board. The power delivery heatsinks are silver in color with a brushed aluminum finish while the chipset heatsink is a black and silver combo.
At a high level, we see typical features here from the 8-pin power lead and a few fan headers up top, four DRAM slots, and six SATA ports to dual M.2 slots along with a slot for the included Intel CNVi Wi-Fi. The top M.2 slot uses a fairly beefy cooler to keep the PCIe NVMe M.2 drives cool. All slots are in black with the primary full-length PCIe slot reinforced to help with heavy video cards. There is a plastic cover for the I/O area and in this case, does not extend down over the audio area as we have seen on other boards.
The B360 Gaming 3 WIFI does include RGB LED illumination. The LEDs are located under the PCH heatsink as well as several running along the bottom of the board lighting up the audio separation strip on the bottom left-hand corner. Along with the onboard lighting, there are a couple of RGB LED headers for additional lighting supporting standard 5050 RGB (RGBW) lighting with a power rating of up to 2A. Both the integrated and attached lights are controlled by the RGB Fusion software.
The board has a total of five 4-pin fan headers able to control the attached air mover through PWM and voltage methods. The two CPU headers and a system fan header are located up top flanking the heatsink on either side, with an additional system fan near the 24-pin ATX 12V connector. The last header (sysfan/pump) is located on the bottom left. There is not a mention if these headers are able to handle over the standard 1A output. All fans are controlled through the BIOS or through Easy Tune and the Smart Fan functionality. Also in view is the first M.2 slot that has the Thermal Guard heatsink on it.
Looking at the top half of the board with the heatsinks removed, we see seven phases for power delivery for the board. The Intersil 95866 4+3 Multiphase PWM regulator controller manages the power sent to the On-Semiconductor MOSFETs. In this case, the B360 Gaming 3 WIFI uses 4C10N and 4C06N 'FETs to help deliver stable power to the CPU. Power is supplied to the VRMs through a single 8-pin EPS 12V connector. We didn't see any throttling during testing while using an i7-8700K.
The closer view of the right side of the board shows the six SATA ports on the far left, the PCH heatsink, a Thunderbolt 3 5-pin header, a USB3.0 header, and a system fan header. Next to the 24-pin ATX 12V have RGB LED connections along with a voltage control jumper for the digital LED headers.
This picture shows the six SATA ports on the board as well as a view of the dummy boot LEDs. Note the top M.2 connector shares bandwidth with the SATA port 5 and the bottom M.2 connector shares with SATA port 3. When either is used in SATA mode, the corresponding SATA port will be unavailable. Also worth noting is the B360 chipset does not support RAID.
The bottom portion of the board holds is where we can see the Realtek ALC892 audio codec hidden under the EMI shields along with its Chemicon capacitors on the bottom left and the PCIe slots in the middle. The board includes three full-length slots with the top full-length slot being the only one CPU connected. The board does support Crossfire but not SLI due to the second slot only supporting a maximum of x4 mode. This slot also shares bandwidth with the two x1 slots. When these are populated, the second PCIe slot operates at x2 mode.
| AORUS B360 Gaming 3 WIFI CPU PCIe Layout | ||
| 16-Lane Single |
16-Lane Dual |
|
| PCIe 2 | @x16 | @x16 |
| PCIe 4 (chipset) | x4 | @x4 |
| SLI | - | No |
| Crossfire | - | Yes |
The back panel IO has a mix of USB 2.0 (4x ports), USB 3.0 (3x ports) and a USB 3.1 Type-A port which should be plenty for most users. As for video outputs, the B360 Gaming 3 WIFI offers DVI-D and HDMI outputs to use the integrated graphics. Last, is a six-plug audio stack, powered from the Realtek ALC892 codec.
In the Box
GIGABYTE Includes the following:
- Driver Disk / Installation Guide / Manual
- Back I/O Plate
- 2 x SATA cables
- Intel CNVi Wi-Fi module
- Antenna
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Galcobar - Friday, July 13, 2018 - link
It would be good if the site could make a decision on whether to follow the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) conventions, or not. The reader shouldn't be left guessing based on the author. There's a reason every newspaper has a style guide: consistency.timecop1818 - Wednesday, July 11, 2018 - link
At least this board comes with Intel lan. When z370 first came out i was looking at gigabyte and every board had killer and or rgb cancer, so goodbye gigabyte, you've lost a customer.The_Assimilator - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link
WTF is "burification", apart from a complete failure to have a barely competent editor?nwrigley - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link
Genuine question here:Why would anyone choose this board when the GIGABYTE H370 is only $10 more?
rocky12345 - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link
Looks like a fairly good board for the price. To bad Intel likes to lock everything down on anything not the top chip set or K SKU CPU's. This board and CPU were not performing worse than the other boards with 8700K's and z370 chip set because of no MCE support it got worse scores because you can not push your memory to it's rated speed EG: 3200MHz will only run at 2667MHz on the lower tier chip sets. It really shows the worse performance you get in games because Intel refuses to remove the memory speed locks on the lower tier chip sets.A lot of sites refer to it as over clocking your memory when you run it at it's rated speed. So if you buy 3200MHz and run it at that but because Intel or AMD support a slower speed in their PR crap you are over clocking it. My own thoughts are I buy 3200Mhz memory I run it at that if it says 3200Mhz on the package then I am running it at it's rated speed. Now if I run it at 3400Mhz then yes I am over clocking it. I get that if Intel or AMD rate a supported speed on their CPU's and have tested them at that speed and have not tested beyond that. We all know more so for Intel that whatever they rate for the speed you will go much higher same for AMD to a lesser extent.
Point is Intel needs to stop the crap and at least unlock things so we can run our memory we bought and paid for to be able to run it at the rated speeds that are on the package. Tghis is why the 8700K sucked a bit more on this chip set and performed much better on the better chip set. Wake up Intel and get your crap together or AMD may just roll over you on the next Ryzen release. Which would be a real shame considering I am a dude that likes my shiny new Intel CPU's but at the same time I do not like being forced into buying the extreme best of the best so I can play around with my system a bit. I built a new system for a customer a couple weeks ago and let me tell you it was pretty boring going into the UEFI and seeing all the things you can not change because of a non K CPU and the memory would not budge 1MHz over 2667MHz but hey you sure could down clock it. Greedy Greedy Greedy maybe with the CEO gone the next one will fix this type of thing and Intel can go back to being the great company they used to be.
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