ASUS ROG STRIX Z370-I Gaming Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

The motherboard looks stunning, and it’s abundantly clear that this is a premium grade product. The black and grey finish oozes quality, and the addition of three large grey/silver heat sinks are an aesthetic treat, albeit very functional too.

The PCIe 16x slot is armoured, so it’ll hope up the weight of any modern GPU without causing damage to the motherboard. The M.2 cover looks great too and it’s a simple screw down design, so it’s easy to remove/install as you need to.

Down the side of the board, you’ll find the usual 24-pin header, an RGB header, front panel pins, two SATA (plus two more further back) and a USB 3.0 header. All basic stuff, but it’s everything you need.

DDR4

The DIMM slots are pretty standard, and it would be nice to see those armoured to match the PCIe slot. However, it’s fine as it is, I’m just nitpicking here.

The star of the show is the new socket, which has a revised design to allow support for the new Coffee Lake CPUs and their increased core count. At its heart, it’s still Z270, but the new CPUs are a nice upgrade, as seen in our other reviews today. The CPU socket is surrounded by solid black caps and chokes, as well as two large heat sinks. Overall, this board should be able to maintain a high power load on the CPU, which should mean great overclocking performance.

Power Delivery

The CPU draws its power from a single 8-pin connector at the top of the motherboard.

The rear I/O is pretty packed, especially for a smaller motherboard. There’s a plethora of USB ports, DisplayPort, HDMI, 1 GbE LAN, the WiFi connectors, and surround sound audio jacks.

Rear M.2

Finally, before we move onto performance, you’ll also find a second M.2 mount on the rear of the motherboard.