Analyzing Z370 for Intel’s 8th Generation Coffee Lake: A Quick Look at 50+ Motherboards

MSI Z370 Godlike Gaming

The Godlike Gaming is an E-ATX sized board which comes with a lot of features. One of the first gear features that stuck out in my heed is a triple Killer E2500 LANs + Killer Wi-Fi, along with U.2 digest and support for five M.2 based devices when using the admit PCIe riser card. It besides comes with a beefy power delivery and a Game Boost knob for slowly overclocking. Can we still turn it up to 11 ? ( Ian : yes, it goes up to 11 )
The Z370 Godlike Gaming ’ s appearance is an all-black PCB with colored grey shrouding all over the board. not only is the back gore IO and sound recording section covered, indeed is the right side of the circuit board starting from the chipset heatsink on all the manner up to the onboard world power, readjust, and game boost overclocking buttons. RGB LEDs find their way under these shrouds equally well as under the PCH heatsink and many-sided places around the circuit board. There are extra headers on the board for adding more RGB, all of which are controlled my MSI ’ s Mystic Light App. The VRM heatsinks are boastfully hunks aluminum but appear to not be connected to each other. All the full-length PCIe and memory slots are reinforced, vitamin a well as the three onboard M.2 slots which are using MSI ’ s M.2 Shield to help cool the drives .

memory slot defend is the platform standard here arsenic well with four slots supporting astir to 64GB, up to a defend speed of DDR4-4133, which is one above the other boards in the product batch which max out at DDR4-4000. All the memory slots are steel reinforced and use a unilateral lock mechanism. The board has a sum of four full-length reinforced PCIe slots and one x1 slot, which combined can handle 2-way SLI and improving to 4-Way AMD Crossfire. This means that the CPU uses an x8/x4/x4 layout from the central processing unit, using slots 1, 2, and 4, while the bottom full-length slot is from the chipset. Slots 1 and 4 are used in a double GPU configuration allowing for adequate spacing between the cards for better cooling system, so the options become x16/0/0 for single cards, x8/0/x8 for dual cards, and x8/x4/x4 for triple cards .
The storage options on this control panel are plentiful in number and type. On the board are three PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots, all using MSI ‘s M.2 Shield. There is besides a possibility to add two more M.2 drives through an circuit board card, which is bundled with the board in certain regions. SATA defend runs the lapp as the other boards at six and supports RAID 0, 1,5, and 10. A fairly singular addition is a single U.2 slot. The M.2 slots, U.2 interface, and SATA ports are partially switched ( using one might disable something else ), so be certain to check the manual of arms for the breakdown.

There are a sum of 10 fan headers on the board scattered all around the board ; all of which can be controlled via the BIOS or MSI Command Center. Audio functionality is handled by the Realtek ALC1220 codec and includes Nichicon and WIMA audio caps vitamin a well as an ESS E9018 DAC for driving headphones. The Z370 Godlike besides has a debug LED, baron and reset buttons, american samoa well as the Gameboost overclocking knob .
MSI quadrupled down on the Rivet Networks Killer products and have three E2500 NICs on board vitamin a well as Killer 1535 Wireless LAN and Bluetooth ( 4.1 ) module. This is because the board can act like a network switch through the updated Killer software : users can have the motherboard act as a passthrough for early devices set up nearby, such as a console or a NAS. In order to enable this feature, Killer required the motherboard to have at least three of its network controllers. If the main internet entree is acquired through one of the ethernet ports, the motherboard can use the Wi-Fi module as a local entree point to the net, enabling radio devices around the system. The lone drawback to this feature is that the personal computer needs to be on and awake at all times.

There are three USB3.1 ( 10 Gbps ) ports handled by the ASM3142 restrainer with one Type-A and one Type-C on the back panel and another Type-C port available through the inner connection. We besides see two native USB 3.1 ( 5Gbps ) ports on the rear panel and four controlled by the ASM1074 hub. The rest are available through inner USB connectors. The back control panel IO contains the Killer Wi-Fi module, a CMOS readjust clitoris, combination PS/2 port, the three Killer NICs, a plug audio push-down storage with SPDIF and a 6.3mm earphone jack. Because the back jury does not have video recording outputs, a discrete GPU is a necessity for this motherboard .