MSI GODLIKE Gaming Z370 Motherboard Review

MSI Godlike Gaming Z370 When it comes to picking a high-end motherboard, you're not exactly short on options. Every big name brand has some part to play, with an extreme motherboard that can unlock the full potential of your new CPU, GPU and other components. However, few come with more features than the Godlike Gaming Z370 from MSI, one of the most extreme consumer Z370 motherboards we'll likely ever see. Equipped with support for the latest 8th Gen Intel Core CPUs, such as the i5-8400, i5-8600K, and i7-8700K which we recently reviewed. Many were sceptical, myself included, about the whole "new motherboard just for the 8th gen" CPU fiasco. However, after seeing their real-world performance for gaming, all is forgiven. Can the Godlike deliver even better performance? I certainly hope so, so let's take a look at what you get for your investment! Features Supports 8th Gen Intel® Core™ / Pentium® / Celeron® processors for LGA 1151 socket Supports DDR4-4133+(OC) Memory Killer xTend: Combine a built-in-switch with wireless extender. Killer fueled LAN & WIFI extender with ultimate traffic prioritization. Mystic Light and Mystic Light Sync: Personalize your PC with 16.8 million colours / 17 effects controlled in one click with the Mystic Light APP or a mobile device. Lightning Fast Game experience: Triple Turbo M.2 with M.2 Shield V2, Turbo U.2 with Steel Armor, Lightning USB 3.1 Gen2 with front gen 2 type-C. Xtreme Audio DAC with Nahimic 2: Isolated audio with ESS DAC, 2x audio processors & Nahimic 2+ to deliver the breathtaking sound quality with 384kHz/32-bit. DDR4 Boost with Steel Armor: Fully isolated and shielded DIMM slots to protect DDR4 modules and delivers pure data signals for best gaming and overclocking. MULTI-GPU: Supports NVIDIA SLI™ and AMD CrossFire™ with optimal slot placement for the best airflow. Triple Killer™ LAN plus Killer™ WIFI: Get ready for the lowest latency with Killer's exclusive network management to prioritize game traffic over any other network traffic. VR Ready: Best virtual reality game experience without latency, reduces motion sickness. BIOS Flashback+: Simply use a USB key to flash any BIOS within seconds, without installing a CPU, memory or graphics card. Military Class 5, Guard-Pro: Latest evolution with high-quality Japanese components for best protection and efficiency. In-Game Weapons: Xsplit, Game Boost, GAMING Hotkey, X-Boost, WTFast. EZ Debug LED: Easiest way to troubleshoot. Click BIOS 5: Award-winning BIOS with high-resolution scalable font, favourites and search function. GAMING CERTIFIED: 24-hour on- and offline game and motherboard testing by eSports players. Check out the full range of features and specifications on the official product page here. Feature Overview There are more features on this motherboard than even most enthusiasts will ever use. Three LAN ports and Killer WiFi certainly takes care of your networking needs. However, I'm super excited to see some proper enthusiast audio hardware here too, such as the DAC and NAhimic 2, with the addition of a gold plated 6.35mm jack on the rear I/O, which is properly cool! Triple M.2, U.2, Optane, overclocking, RGB, armour, the list goes on and on. Let's just skip ahead, and take a look at the design! Product Trailer https://youtu.be/ZAgdP3ATAL4 What's in the Box If you thought the feature list was long, pull up a comfortable chair, as the added components stack up pretty quickly too. First we have this lovely pull-tie bag. In the bag, you'll find a bunch of flat and braided SATA cables, lighting extension cables, USB bridge cable and hub, Wi-Fi antenna, a metal sticker, and gold plated headphone adapter. The cables are superb quality too. Most of them are black and grey, however, you also get two black and red ones to keep things interesting. But Wait, There's More! All the usual documentation is included too, as well as a bunch of cable stickers to keep things in order. Need even more M.2 storage to boost those loading times? You get a slick looking M.2 RAID card included in the box, which features armour on each slot. Tired of having the same old rear I/O? The stock one comes with magnetic covers, allowing you to tweak the design to your liking. RGB! Finally, get your chassis lighting game on with ease, thanks to this 450mm Phanteks Rainbow Strip. It hooks straight up to the motherboard and will sync with the motherboard. Right, now onto the motherboard! A Closer Look This is one epic looking motherboard, there's no doubt about that. With all black and grey hardware, it's pretty stealthy and should blend in with pretty much any colour scheme. Of course, it's packing a lot of RGB lighting, so you can easily customise the look to suit your needs. The VRM cooling is robust, with massive heatsinks that are going to make light work of cooling the motherboard. As you can see, the chokes are plentiful too, and when it comes to overclocking, you should have zero to worry about here. There are four DIMM slots, all protected by armour to prevent the motherboard from flexing. Of course, they also serve the purpose of looking cool, which is just fine by me. Also tucked away here, you'll find a power, reset and game boost controls. Onboard controls are great for quick overclocking and tweaking, especially if you're working on a test bench. Connectivity is plentiful on this motherboard, with a bank of U.2 and SATA 6 down the right side, as well as a FP Type-C, and 3.0 USB connector. There's another USB 3.0 on the bottom, as well as three USB 2.0. Storage gets another boost from a bank of three M.2 drive mounts. Of course, you can see that they all come with M.2 Shield keeping them protected and cool too. There are four full-size PCIe slots, all fully armoured and well spaced to allow for multi-GPU configurations. The audio hardware is hidden under a guard too, where you'll find a built-in DAC and AMP, as well as all the general processing hardware. The audio should be super clean and powerful too, thanks to some dedicated gold capacitors, and a motherboard trace preventing any interference. Holy I/O Batman! The back of this motherboard means serious freaking business. There are only USB 3.0 ports here, seven of them to be exact. If that wasn't enough, you'll also find a Type-C connector for good measure. Networking is insanely comprehensive too, with three Gigabit ports, as well as ultra-fast WiFi built-in. The audio enthusiast in me is also excited to see a full-size headphone jack, meaning those high-end headphones won't have to go through an adaptor, just hook them right into the board! Finally, on the rear of the motherboard, you can see that the two huge heatsinks are screwed down, not just pinned. This fitting method ensures they're more secure, and can even be removed for maintenance or modding requirements. Testing and Methodology Test Procedure Here at eTeknix, we endeavour to disclose vital information regarding the benchmarking process so that readers can quantify the results and attempt to replicate them using their hardware. When it comes to motherboard reviews, the benchmarks are pretty self-explanatory although there are a few exceptions. Rember that your choice of motherboard, the silicon lottery, and other factors can yield different numbers, and there's always a margin for error when using the software. Therefore, your experience may vary. Each benchmark runs three times, and the average figure is taken to try to reduce the effect of hardware variation. Of course, any relevant details regarding the parameters will be listed below. Test Systems Z370 CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Quad-Channel 32GB CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S Graphics Card – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X399 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Quad-Channel 32GB CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S Graphics Card – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X299 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400MHz Quad-Channel 32GB CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit AM4 Ryzen R3, R5 and R7 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - GeIL DDR4 2977MHz Dual Channel 16GB CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Z270 Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM - Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666 MHz CPU Cooler – Noctua D15S Graphics Card – Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X99 - Our GPU Review Test Bench Motherboard – Changes Per Review RAM – Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666 MHz CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Open Air Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 64-bit Games Used All games are tested on a 60 Hz display with V-Sync off for all tests. Previously we would use "extreme" presets, but these have now been adjusted to "Medium" or equivalent to better test the capabilities of the CPU, not the GPU. Rise of the Tomb Raider (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Pure Hair Off Deus Ex (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Uplay) Medium Preset Turf Effects Off Far Cry Primal (Uplay) Normal Preset Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download) FireStrike (1080p) Benchmark Unigine Superposition (download) 1080p Extreme Benchmark PCMark 10 Professional (download) Express Benchmark WPrime (download) 32M and 1024M Power usage recorded at 1024M 50% complete, thermals recorded at 75% CineBench R15 (download) CPU Multi CPU Single Handbrake (download) Custom MP4 to MKV 4K conversion (details below) AIDA64 Engineer (download) CPU-Z (download) HWMonitor (download) Handbrake To stress processors to their absolute limit and accurately judge their performance in video editing workloads, we transcode a 7.7GB compilation of gaming footage; this particular file is freely available from here. The captured footage is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, it has a bit rate of 50.1 Mbps and it uses the Advanced Video Codec. Additionally, the video runs at a constant 30 frames-per-second and opts for a 3820 x 2140 (4K) resolution. Once loaded into Handbrake, we then transcode the 4K MP4 to an MKV file using the "normal" profile. Other Notes A rest period of 2-5 minutes is observed between each piece of software allowing the system to return to its idle power usage and temperatures. Background services like Windows Update are checked to not be running during the testing period by setting WiFi to Metered Connection. Thanks Thank you to Noctua, Crucial, ASUS, Gigabyte, Lian-Li, be quiet!, OCZ, for providing the hardware that helps makes these tests possible! Synthetic Benchmarks 3DMark Firestrike As one of the flagship motherboards onthe Z370 launch, it's no surprise that the Godlike posted our second highest score straight away. It didn't hit the top spot once overclocked, but it's certainly up there with the best, posting our fifth highest score. Stock Overclocked Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme Competitive scores for Unigine too, although this test is very much GPU bound so there's little to no difference for most motherboards. However, hitting scores of 5539 at stock and 5528 while overclocked tells us that PCIe throughput is great. Stock Overclocked PCMark 10 Express For PCMark 10 Express, the Godlike hit our third fastest score at stock, and a fantastic score of 6320 once overclocked. Not as high as I had expected, but easily competitive with everything else. Stock Overclocked WPrime 32M and 1024M The Intel Core i7-8700K is no slouch, and with the Godlike it hit a blazing fast 114.565s in WPrime at stock. However, overclocking took that time down to a very impressive 100.604, one of the fastest times for the Z370 platform. Stock Overclocked Cinebench R15 Again, not the fastest in Cinibench, but hitting 1551 at stock and 1644 is easy competition for any other high-end Z370 motherboard. Stock Overclocked Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K While not by a huge margin, the Godlike set our (joint) highest score for Handbrake too, hitting 60 FPS, which is incredibly fast for a consumer CPU rendering 4K video. Of course, overclocking pushed that demanding benchmark up to 62 FPS. Stock Overclocked AIDA 64 Memory Bandwidth and Latency The memory performance wasn't perfect, lagging just a tiny bit compared to some of the other Z370 motherboards. Of course, it's not exactly hurt the main performance, but you can be sure this will improve with future BIOS updates, as it usually does. Gaming Performance Now we come down to what really matters to most of us, the gaming performance! Of course, anything less than awesome just isn't going to cut it for this motherboard, and thankfully, it doesn't disappoint. In Deus Ex, it scored a fantastic 144 FPS, not the fastest, but it's still in the high-end section of the chart. For Tomb Raider, it was just 0.3 FPS off the top spot, scoring 208.1FPS! So clearly it's capable of getting great scores in DX12 benchmarks. For Ghost Recon Wildlands, 139.2, is a good score, but clearly not our best. Not to worry though, as the board redeemed itself in style, scoring a new record for Far Cry: Primal, with our highest minimum frame rate to date, as well as our highest overall frame rate of 170FPS! Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Rise of the Tomb Raider Ghost Recon: Wildlands Far Cry Primal Power Consumption and Temperatures Power Consumption Impressively, this motherboard sips at the power, which is not what I expected. Big motherboard, big power, right? But it's pretty efficient, and that's obviously not a bad thing. Stock Overclocked Final Thoughts Pricing OK, this is the hold on to your wallet and try not to drown moment, as the MSI Godlike Gaming Z370 motherboard is a credit card killing, wallet crushing, explain to your SO where all the money has gone, monster. It'll set you back around £500! That's easily as expensive as Z370 can possibly get. A standard consumer board, you'll expect change from £200, but this is not a standard consumer board. Overview As you've seen from our benchmarks today, the MSI Godlike Gaming is no slouch when it comes to performance. It can easily keep pace with anything the competition has, and even beat a few of them in various benchmarks. So why is this one so expensive? Simple, it has more features than any day-to-day consumer will likely ever need. If that wasn't enough, it has even more features still that a lot of extreme and enthusiast users would use, but the fact is, it has them, and they don't come free. Price vs The Rest of the Build Let's look at that motherboard design just one more time. Just let it soak in what you're looking at here. Room for four stick of RAM, room for five M.2 drives if you use the PCIe expansion card too. Then you've got a set of four armoured PCIe slots, that's room for three or four GPUs dependant on your configuration. There's extensive networking and WiFi connection options for class-leading connectivity. We're just getting warmed up here, as there's onboard controls, advanced RGB LED lighting, an extensive amount of armour, and huge heat sinks. Audiophiles rejoice at the flagship DAC and Nahimic 2 audio hardware, and the list keeps going. Try adding up how much it would take financially to max out what this motherboard can handle. The Godlike isn't mucking about, this is not a motherboard for systems that cost £1000-2000, it's capable of systems that are getting up into the five digit price ranges and beyond. More Extreme than Extreme? This motherboard is rocking the best of the best right out of the box. However, there's plenty of overclockers out there that think they can do better. I know there's more to this motherboard than we tested, and if you're ready to get out your extreme PSU, and your LN2 pots, and everything else, it'll likely be the motherboard of choice for setting the next wave of world record benchmarks. Connectivity Like No Other Three LAN ports on the back of this motherboard are insane. Most people don't know what they can do with two, let alone three. For the enthusiast networkers out there, it's a great feature to have. Of course, you can also bridge in the blazing fast Wifi too, for improved speed and better traffic management. Gaming Setting some of our highest ever scores in all of our gaming benchmarks, the Godlike Gaming certainly lives up to its name. However, if you spend the time to finetune the overclocking features of this motherboard, the sky is the limit. With the right binned CPU, the amount of custom loop cooling, and diving into overclocking your GPU and memory, etc, it could easily be the only motherboard for those who seek the highest frame rates available today. Pros High-end performance Easy to overclock Suitable for extreme and LN2 overclocking Incredible networking options Class-leading audio hardware and connectivity Support up to 5 x M.2 drives (with PCIe card) Fully customisable RGB lighting Large heat sinks Armoured hardware Class-leading build-quality Exceptional design and aesthetics On board controls High-quality braided cables included Customisable rear I/O cover RGB LED strip included in the box Cons Memory performance could be better, but a few BIOS updates should tighten that up Neutral The price isn't for the faint of heart