Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 3 Test

Manufacturer: Gigabyte

United kingdom cost (every bit reviewed): £144.95 (inc. VAT)

US price (as reviewed): $149.99 (exc. tax)

Not anybody has the upkeep or the demand to spend big when it comes to motherboards, and the latter is specially true when it comes to basic features. Overclocking and testing tools, RGB lighting, and One thousand.ii heatsinks are all very well, only they're non essential and do bump upward the toll of whatever motherboard.

So if you lot just want the nuts - after all, most of us practice little more visit the EFI a few times to apply an overclock and fix up fan control and perchance RGB lighting before nosotros crack on with a few years of gaming - and so there are enough of options to get on Intel'south Coffee Lake train with a Z370 motherboard for less than £150. In fact, if you lot shop around, the Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 3 tin exist had for less than £140, making it pretty close in cost to MSI's excellent Z370 SLI Plus.

Things look set up for a decent showdown between the two budget-friendly boards, as both accept managed to tame their price tags without cutting back the characteristic list too much. They both offer full-fat Realtek ALC1220 sound and the full complement of audio jacks for multi-channel speaker systems, although Gigabyte here lacks an optical output - something you do go on the MSI board. You also become isolated audio circuitry that., forth with the PCH heatsink logo, is RGB-illuminated, although nosotros're not looking at the bogus lord's day-like luminance you could await from one of Gigabyte'south more than expensive boards. You'll as well need your own RGB LED strip extension cables, as none are included in the box.

The PCB is perhaps not as classy as the blackness 1 on the MSI board, only you get a similar layout with an extra PCIe x1 slot likewise as steel-reinforced primary PCIe x16 slots. The aesthetic points continue to stack in the MSI board's favour thanks to all the SATA 6Gbps ports and USB 3.0 header sitting parallel to the PCB, simply at to the lowest degree Gigabyte has included an I/O shield as well as 2 hefty heatsinks.

The rear console is fairly typical, with a mixture of USB 2.0, 3.0, and 3.1 ports with both Type-A and Type-C ports for the latter as well as a header on the PCB for front panel Type-C ports (limited to USB 3.0 speed, still) - something missing on the MSI board. Even so, the LAN port here is Killer-powered rather than preferred Intel on the MSI. In that location is one overclocking tool present on the Z370 Aorus Gaming 3, though, which is an OC button. This you can press while in Windows to automatically overclock your hardware. With our Core i7-8700K, this hit 4.9GHz with a adequately high vcore of 1.35V, which pushed our all-in-one liquid-cooler to the limit. Sadly, upon rebooting, this is reset to stock speed, so information technology'southward only useful as a temporary overclock, and fifty-fifty so, you'll likely get better results yourself seeing as our CPU is happy at 5GHz with far less voltage.

Specifications

ChipsetIntel Z370
Form factor ATX
CPU back up Intel Socket LGA 1151-V2
Memory back up Dual-channel, four slots, max 64GB
Sound Eight-channel Realtek ALC1220A
Networking 1 x Killer Gigabit Ethernet
Ports 2 x G.2 PCIe three.0 x4 32Gbps (one x PCIe/SATA 6Gbps up to 22110, 1 x PCIe upwards to 2280), 6 x SATA 6Gbps, one x USB iii.ane Type-A, i x USB 3.1 Type-C, one ten USB iii.0 Type-C header, 6 ten USB 3.0 (ii via headers), half-dozen x USB 2.0 (4 via headers), 1 x LAN, 6 x audio out
Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244
Extras None