GIGABYTE Z370N WIFI ITX Motherboard Review

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Feature Testing: RGB Fusion

Feature Testing: RGB Fusion

Given its petite size, the Z370N WIFI obviously doesn't have most exciting lighting implementation. In fact, there are only four small RGB LEDs on this motherboard, all placed on the under side in the bottom left corner. As you will see below, by themselves these LEDs don't exactly put on much of a light show.

Thankfully, GIGABYTE have included two LED light strip headers for those who want to expand these lighting capabilities. There is one RGB header that can be used to connect a standard 5050 RGB LED strip with maximum power rating of 2A/12V and maximum length of up to 2 meters. The second header can be used to connect a non-RGB 5050 digital LED strip with maximum power rating of 2A/12V (or 5V) and maximum length of up to 5 meters or maximum of 300 individual LEDs. For this second header GIGABYTE has included a power select jumper that allows users to select the required supply voltage of the connected LED light strip, either 5V or 12V.

Controlling these onboard LEDs and connected light strips is the freshly overhauled RGB Fusion utility:

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As mentioned above, RGB Fusion has been significantly improved for this generation, and it might just be the very best RGB LED management utility on the market right now. Going over every setting would be impossible, but suffice it to say that the LEDs can be adjusted to any number of different colours and customized to create cool lighting effects, like fading in and out, syncing with your music, cycling through all of the colours, flashing on and off, flashing sections randomly, or even just displaying one static colour. Also, with this utility you can control any connected peripherals that are compatible with RGB Fusion, like keyboards, and mice, and graphics cards, etc.

Click on image to enlarge​

We are using very tall motherboard standoffs to show you what the underside mounted lighting looks like at a very oblique angle and with an overhead shot. As you see, there isn't a ton of light produced by the four small RGB LEDs that are all located in the lower left side corner of the motherboard. Thankfully, as mentioned above, there are onboard headers that give willing users the ability to expand the lighting capabilities of the Z370N WIFI.

 

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Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Feature Testing: Onboard Audio

Since fewer and fewer consumers seem to be buying discrete sound cards, the quality of a motherboard's onboard audio is now more important than ever. As such, we figured that it was worthwhile to take a closer look at just how good the analog signal quality is coming out of the onboard audio subsystem that is implemented on the Z370N WIFI. As mentioned earlier, this model features the modern Realtek ALC1220 codec and Nichicon Fine Gold audio capacitors. However, unlike most motherboards in this price range it does not have an aftermarket Texas Instruments amplifier, relying instead on the internal op-amp built into the Realtek codec. Given that this is a Mini-ITX model where PCB space isn't exactly plentiful, this omission is understandable.

Because isolated results don't really mean much, but we have also included some numbers from the plethora of motherboards that we have previously reviewed. All of the motherboards that we have included are feature onboard audio solutions that are built around the Realtek ALC1150 or ALC1220 codecs, but feature different op-amps, headphone amplifiers, filtering capacitors, secondary components and layouts.

We are going to do this using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, since sound quality isn't really something that can be adequately explained with only numbers. To do the quantitative portion, we have turned to RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA), which the standard application for this type of testing.

Since all modern motherboards support very high quality 24-bit, 192kHz audio playback we selected that as the sample mode option. Basically, what this test does is pipe the audio signal from the front-channel output to the line-in input via a 3.5mm male to 3.5mm male mini-plug cable, and then RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA) does the audio analysis. Obviously we disabled all software enhancements since they interfere with the pure technical performance that we are trying to benchmark.

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While the Z370N WIFI did not achieve audio numbers as exceptional as the similarly-sized ASUS STRIX Z270I, we have zero complaints about its output. Frequency response, noise level, dynamic range, and stereo crosstalk were all excellent, so that's a clear sign that GIGABYTE has done a great job engineering this model's cramped onboard audio section.

As we always mention, we aren't experts when it comes to sound quality, but at this high level we suspect that just about anyone should be satisfied. We listened to a variety of music and spoken word content using a mix of Grado SR225i and Koss PortaPro headphones, Westone UM1 IEMs, and Logitech Z-5500 5.1 speakers, and the playback was clean and plenty loud. As long as you aren't trying to power very high impedance headphones, the lack of a third-party headphone amplifier will not be a noticeable omission.

 

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Feature Testing: M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4

Feature Testing: M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4

One of the big advancements of the previous two LGA1151 platforms was the fact that they brought the M.2 slot to the mainstream. Not only did they make this modern storage connector available at a more reasonable price, but it was now properly implemented too. While some earlier platforms supported the M.2 interface most were speed limited or had a caveats list a mile long. Meanwhile all Z170 and Z270 motherboard boasted about their "full speed" PCI-E 3.0 x4 M.2 slots and our reviews verified those performance claims. With this new Z370 launch we expect similar performance levels from the M.2 slots, and that is what we are here to find out.

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Since few SSDs exist that can reach the 3.5-3.6GB/s real-life speed limit of this interface, we settled on one that can crack the 2000MB/s barrier: the Samsung SSD 950 PRO 256GB. Despite now being usurped by the SSD 960 PRO, this high performance NVMe PCI-E SSD combines Samsung's powerful UBX controller with its industry-leading 3D V-NAND and is capable of sequential read speeds of up to 2,200MB/second and write speeds of up to 900MB/sec.

One of the ways that we will be evaluating the performance of a motherboard's M.2 interface is by verifying that is capable of matching or exceeding these listed transfer rates. The other is by checking to see whether it performs as well as when we install the SSD 950 PRO onto a ASUS Hyper M.2 x4 expansion card plugged directly into a PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot. The PCI-E lanes that the M.2 slot requires can come from either the processor or more usually the Z370 PCH, and we are interested to see how well that lane splitting was implemented and whether it is causing any performance issues. Also, since there are two M.2 slots, we are interested in determining whether there is a performance difference between both of them.

Without further ado, here are the results:

Front M.2 x4 3.0 slot vs. Back M.2 x4 3.0 slot​

As can see, the performance of the two M.2 slots on the Z370N WIFI was essentially as expected. They both performed very consistently with each other - within 1% - which is well within benchmark variances. While the Q32T1 read speed is a fair bit lower than we are used to seeing, this is the first motherboard that we have reviewed since the Spectre & Meltdown software and BIOS patches have been released, so we will have to see what storage performance looks like on the next Z370 motherboard that we review.

While transfer rates are obviously an important metric, we figured that it was also worthwhile to take a peak at instructions per second (IOPS) to ensure that there wasn't any variance there either:

Front M.2 x4 3.0 slot vs. Back M.2 x4 3.0 slot​

Once again, the differences are essentially non-existent and well within the margin of error for this benchmark. As a result, it is clear that the M.2 interfaces on the Z370N WIFI has been equally well implemented. We are once again seeing lower 4K results than expected, but as mentioned above the latest software and BIOS patches might be hindering performance a bit. We will explore this a little more in the future.

 

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Auto & Manual Overclocking Results

Auto & Manual Overclocking Results

It wouldn't be an HWC review if we didn't include some overclocking results, so we thoroughly tested this motherboard's capabilities, especially its auto-overclocking functionality. There won't be any ground breaking insights on how to overclock Coffee Lake - since it is as similar as Kaby Lake was to Skylake - but our personal pointers are to increase the vCore up to around 1.35V if you're cooling can handle it (...both CPU and VRM cooling!!), while increasing the VCCIO up to 1.15V, and the System Agent voltage up to 1.20V if you plan on increasing the cache or memory frequency. If you are trying to achieve DDR4 memory speeds above DDR4-3866, try increasing the VCCIO to 1.20V, the vSA to 1.25V, and it might even be worth trying to increase the memory voltage to 1.40V or 1.45V on this platform. By the way, if you have an unlocked K-series processor, there's no reason to go crazy increasing the BCLK if you can achieve similar results by just tweaking the various multipliers instead.

Auto Overclocking

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The Z370N WIFI features three types of automatic overclocking, two software based and one BIOS based. Within the EasyTune utility, there is a OC preset and the more intelligent and supposedly more capable AutoTuning feature. The OC preset is super simple; you just click on the icon, the system reboots and the overclock is applied. AutoTuning is a "smart" auto-overclocking feature in that it doesn't utilize presets. Instead, AutoTuning slowly increases the system frequencies and voltages, and does some stress testing at each level until it finds the limit. It then initiates a reboot to lock-in the overclock. The whole process takes about 5 to 10 minutes.

Let's take a look at the software approaches first:

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As indicated under the icon, the OC preset increased the core clock to 4.9GHz, which is a huge 1.2GHz upgrade from the Core i7-8700K's 3.7GHz base frequency. While the Vcore normally bounced between 1.260V and 1.272V when running most benchmarks, it would spike up to 1.356V when fully loaded with Prime95. This is not an unreasonable amount of voltage - and probably required to ensure that even the worst Coffee Lake chips can reach this frequency - but on this motherboard it can and will easily overwhelm the CPU VRM and cause MOSFET temperatures to skyrocket, as we mentioned earlier in the Closer Look section. Lastly, as we have come to expect from simple presets, there was also no overclock applied to either the memory or cache.

Next, let's check out AutoTuning:

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After a brief countdown that you can skip, AutoTuning ultimately returned a 4.9Ghz core clock that was identical to the OC preset. It used the same amount of voltage as well. As above, be wary of using this preset for an extended period of time. Also, once again, AutoTuning failed to recognize our memory kit's XMP profile and as a result kept memory frequency and timings remained at default levels.

Next, we have the BIOS-based automatic overclocking option called CPU Upgrade:

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As you might expect, we went straight to the most aggressive CPU Upgrade preset that was available. In this case, it was 5.0GHz for our Core i7-8700K. While the CPU core voltage would occasionally drop to 1.248V during benchmarks, it averaged closer to 1.28-1.29V and peaked at between 1.38V when getting hammered by Prime95. Once again, with this much voltage you need not only a great CPU cooler but a serious CPU VRM with beefy MOSFET cooling, both of which this model lacks.

Manual Overclocking

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When we took thing into our own hands, we set a simple static Vcore that averaged about 1.33V. This is enough voltage to stabilize this frequency for any given workload, while admittedly being too much voltage for most tasks...especially on this motherboard given the aforementioned VRM temperature issue.

Next we focused on maximizing cache and memory performance. We were able to push the cache from a constantly varying 4.20-4.40GHz up to 4.60Ghz, which helped make sure that there wouldn’t be a bandwidth bottleneck once we started pushing the memory clocks.

Now as you can see, this motherboard was able to run our G.Skill DDR4-3866 memory kit at its rated speed and timings. This was as simple as enabling XMP in the UEFI, which is the user-friendly approach that we know most owners will use. Having said that, if you let the motherboard handle voltages it will obviously set them needlessly high, so we recommend manually changing the VCCIO to 1.20V and the vCCSA to 1.25V to start off and then tweaking them downwards unless you lose stability.

Since this model advertises support for overclocked memory frequencies of up to DDR4-4400, we wanted to see it we would easily hit DDR4-4000. By using the DDR4-3866 XMP settings as a launching point, we were able to manually achieve our goal:

Memory Overclocking

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As you can see, we were able to easily hit a solid DDR4-4000, which almost reached an incredible 56GB/s of read bandwidth. All that was required is manually adjusting the VCCSA to 1.20V, the VCCIO to 1.16V, and the memory voltage to 1.38V. GIGABYTE has certified this little motherboard for overclocked memory speeds of up to DDR4-4400, which is frankly insane and not something that we can test. However, given how simple achieving the DDR4-4000 mark was, we have no reason to doubt their claims.

Overall, while the tiny Z370N WIFI is very capable in the overclocking department it is perhaps best to not take full advantage of its capabilities. The simple fact of the matter is that the small VRM and inadequate cooling just can't handle the demands of a highly overclocked and overvolted six-core Core i7-8700K. The situation with the i7-8600K or i3-8350K likely wouldn't be all that much better either. A more interesting approach to tweaking on this motherboard would be attempting to reach maybe 4.5GHz across all cores and using the lowest possible voltage in order to minimize power draw.

 

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System Benchmarks

System Benchmarks

In the System and Gaming Benchmarks sections, we reveal the results from a number of benchmarks run with the Core i7-8700K and Z370N WIFI at default settings, with XMP enabled, with the highest automatic overclock, and and using own our manual overclock. This will illustrate how much performance can be achieved with this motherboard in stock and overclocked form. For a thorough comparison of the Core i7-8700K versus a number of different CPUs have a look at our "Intel Coffee Lake i7-8700K & i5-8400 Review" article.

SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP

When running the SuperPI 32MB benchmark, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system. We are running one instance of SuperPi Mod v1.9 WP. This is therefore a single-thread workload.

wPRIME 2.10

wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions, with f(x)=x2-k, where k is the number we're sqrting, until Sgn(f(x)/f'(x)) does not equal that of the previous iteration, starting with an estimation of k/2. It then uses an iterative calling of the estimation method a set amount of times to increase the accuracy of the results. It then confirms that n(k)2=k to ensure the calculation was correct. It repeats this for all numbers from 1 to the requested maximum. This is a highly multi-threaded workload.

Cinebench R15

Cinebench R15 64-bit
Test1: CPU Image Render
Comparison: Generated Score

The latest benchmark from MAXON, Cinebench R15 makes use of all your system's processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene using various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. This particular benchmarking can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

WinRAR x64

WinRAR x64 5.40
Test: Built-in benchmark, processing 1000MB of data.
Comparison: Time to Finish

One of the most popular file archival and compression utilities, WinRAR's built-in benchmark is a great way of measuring a processor's compression and decompression performance. Since it is a memory bandwidth intensive workload it is also useful in evaluating the efficiency of a system's memory subsystem.

FAHBench

FAHBench 1.2.0
Test: OpenCL on CPU
Comparison: Generated Score

FAHBench is the official Folding@home benchmark that measures the compute performance of CPUs and GPUs. It can test both OpenCL and CUDA code, using either single or double precision, and implicit or explicit modeling. The single precision implicit model most closely relates to current folding performance.

HEVC Decode Benchmark v1.61

HEVC Decode Benchmark (Cobra) v1.61
Test: Frame rates at various resolution, focusing on the top quality 25Mbps bitrate results.
Comparison: FPS (Frames per Second)

The HEVC Decode Benchmark measures a system's HEVC video decoding performance at various bitrates and resolutions. HEVC, also known as H.265, is the successor to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) standard and it is very computationally intensive if not hardware accelerated. This decode test is done entirely on the CPU.

LuxMark v3.1

Test: OpenCL CPU Mode benchmark of the LuxBall HDR scene.
Comparison: Generated Score

LuxMark is a OpenCL benchmarking tool that utilizes the LuxRender 3D rendering engine. Since it OpenCL based, this benchmark can be used to test OpenCL rendering performance on both CPUs and GPUs, and it can put a significant load on the system due to its highly parallelized code.

PCMark 10

PCMark 10 is the latest iteration of Futuremark’s system benchmark franchise. It generates an overall score based upon system performance with all components being stressed in one way or another. The result is posted as a generalized score. In this case, we tested with both the standard Conventional benchmark and the Accelerated benchmark, which automatically chooses the optimal device on which to perform OpenCL acceleration.

AIDA64 Memory Benchmark

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a diagnostic and benchmarking software suite for home users that provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives.

The benchmarks used in this review are the memory bandwidth and latency benchmarks. Memory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy) measure the maximum achievable memory data transfer bandwidth. The code behind these benchmark methods are written in Assembly and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD, Intel and VIA processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86/x64, x87, MMX, MMX+, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX, and AVX2 instruction set extension.
The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.

 

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Gaming Benchmarks

Gaming Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark (2013)

3DMark v1.1.0
Graphic Settings: Fire Strike Preset
Rendered Resolution: 1920x1080
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark is the brand new cross-platform benchmark from the gurus over at Futuremark. Designed to test a full range of hardware from smartphones to high-end PCs, it includes three tests for DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 hardware, and allows users to compare 3DMark scores with other Windows, Android and iOS devices. Most important to us is the new Fire Strike preset, a DirectX 11 showcase that tests tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Like every new 3DMark version, this test is extremely GPU-bound, but it does contain a heavy physics test that can show off the potential of modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark 11

3DMark 11 v1.0.5
Graphic Settings: Extreme Preset
Resolution: 1920x1080
Test: Specific Physics Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score


3DMark 11 is Futuremark's very latest benchmark, designed to tests all of the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. At the moment, it is lot more GPU-bound than past versions are now, but it does contain a terrific physics test which really taxes modern multi-core processors.

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage v1.1.2
Graphic Settings: Performance Preset
Resolution: 1280x1024

Test: Specific CPU Score and Full Run 3DMarks
Comparison: Generated Score

3DMark Vantage is the follow-up to the highly successful 3DMark06. It uses DirectX 10 exclusively so if you are running Windows XP, you can forget about this benchmark. Along with being a very capable graphics card testing application, it also has very heavily multi-threaded CPU tests, such Physics Simulation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which makes it a good all-around gaming benchmark.

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark

Valve Particle Simulation Benchmark
Resolution: 1920x1080
Anti-Aliasing: 4X
Anisotropic Filtering: 8X
Graphic Settings: High

Comparison: Particle Performance Metric

Originally intended to demonstrate new processing effects added to Half Life 2: Episode 2 and future projects, the particle benchmark condenses what can be found throughout HL2:EP2 and combines it all into one small but deadly package. This test does not symbolize the performance scale for just Episode Two exclusively, but also for many other games and applications that utilize multi-core processing and particle effects. This benchmark might be a little old, but is still very highly-threaded and thus will keep scaling nicely as processors gain more and more threads. As you will see the benchmark does not score in FPS but rather in its own "Particle Performance Metric", which is useful for direct CPU comparisons.

X3: Terran Conflict

X3: Terran Conflict 1.2.0.0
Resolution: 1920x1080
Texture & Shader Quality: High
Antialiasing 4X
Anisotropic Mode: 8X
Glow Enabled

Game Benchmark
Comparison: FPS (Frames per Second)

X3: Terran Conflict (X3TC) is the culmination of the X-series of space trading and combat simulator computer games from German developer Egosoft. With its vast space worlds, intricately detailed ships, and excellent effects, it remains a great test of modern CPU performance. While the X3 Reality engine is single-threaded, it provides us with an interesting look at performance in an old school game environment.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward Benchmark

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward
Resolution: 1920x1080
Texture & Shader Quality: Maximum IQ
DirectX 11
Fullscreen

Game Benchmark
Comparison: Generated Score

Square Enix released this benchmarking tool to rate how your system will perform in Heavensward, the expansion to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. This official benchmark software uses actual maps and playable characters to benchmark gaming performance and assign a score to your PC.

Grand Theft Auto V

DirectX Version: DirectX 11
Resolution: 1920x1080
FXAA: On
MSAA: X4
NVIDIA TXAA: Off
Anisotropic Filtering: X16
All advanced graphics settings off.

In GTA V, we utilize the handy in-game benchmarking tool. We do ten full runs of the benchmark and average the results of pass 3 since they are the least erratic. We do additional runs if some of the results are clearly anomalous. The Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) is ostensibly multi-threaded, but it definitely places the bulk of the CPU load on only one or two threads.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Resolution: 1920x1080
Graphical Quality: Custom
Mesh/Shadow/Texture Filtering/Vegetation Range: Ultra
Lighting/Texture Quality/Ambient Occlusion: High
Depth of Field/Order Independent Transparency/Tessellation: Enabled

With its high resolution textures and several other visual tweaks, Shadow of Mordor’s open world is also one of the most detailed around. This means it puts massive load on graphics cards and should help point towards which GPUs will excel at next generation titles. We do three full runs of the benchmark and average the results.

 

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Voltage Regulation / Power Consumption

Voltage Regulation

Unsurprisingly, the GIGABYTE Z370N WIFI does not have onboard voltage measurement points, which is what we prefer to rely on in order to accurately measure the various system voltages. As a result, in this abbreviated overview, we utilized the AIDA64 System Stability Test to put a very substantial load on the system while also monitoring the stability of the all-important CPU Vcore line. This was achieved with a 120 minute stress test, and in order to increase the strain on the motherboard's voltage regulation components we overclocked our Core i7-8700K to 5.0Ghz at 1.35V.

Even without touching the Load-Line Calibration (LLC) settings, the Vcore on this motherboard was remarkably stable. While we occasionally saw up to 1.35V for a half-second or so - not enough of a variance to cause an actual spike in the line - the voltage remained at 1.344V for the bulk of the two hour test. This is impressive stability given that the entire CPU VRM was being incredibly stressed (...and heated) throughout this stress test.

Power Consumption

For this section, every energy saving feature was enabled in the BIOS and the Windows power plan was changed from High Performance to Balanced. For our idle test, we let the system idle for 15 minutes and measured the peak wattage through our UPM EM100 power meter. For our CPU load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads, measuring the peak wattage via the UPM EM100 power meter. For our overall system load test, we ran Prime 95 on all available threads while simultaneously loading the GPU with 3DMark Vantage - Test 6 Perlin Noise.

When compared to the NZXT N7, this mini model achieved comparable idle results but significantly better CPU and system load numbers. Although great to see, the results are not due to some magic sauce from GIGABYTE, but because NZXT's motherboard uses an unnecessarily high CPU core voltage at all times.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

At first glance the GIGABYTE Z370N WIFI is easy to love. This is a petite motherboard that has a level of features and functionality that we would very pleased to see on a ATX motherboard, but this model is less than half that size. Not only does it have triple video outputs that includes a highly sought after HDMI 2.0 port, but there are dual full-speed M.2 slots, dual Intel-powered gigabit LAN ports, Intel-powered dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity, and roughly the same CPU VRM as all but one of GIGABYTE's full-sized Z370 motherboards.

It's regrettable that it is this last part that ultimately hampers the Z370N WIFI the most. This motherboard has a six phase (4+2) power design that only allocates four phases towards the CPU cores, and the MOSFETs responsible for handling that load are cooled by a pretty lightweight heatsink. When you combine a high power draw with too few phases and too little cooling, you end up with very high MOSFET temperatures. On our open test bench, when hammering our stock Core i7-8700K with a worst-case scenario Prime95 workload the peak MOSFET temperatures were a fair bit higher than average, but not problematic. However, when we started overclocking, using the same test we would routinely and easily see MOSFET temperatures breaking the dreaded 100°C / 212°F mark and peaking at an eye-watering 120°C / 248°F. Once you place this motherboard in a small confined enclosure, we wouldn't be surprised to see even worse numbers. As a result, we think that it is fair to recommend that if this motherboard appeals to you - and as mentioned above there is a lot to love - overclocking should be avoided. In fact, it wouldn't hurt to try and undervolt your processor a bit.

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With that out of the way, we can further highlight this model's strengths.

The triple video outputs are obviously a huge selling point, with a trifecta of a HDMI 2.0 port, a HDMI 1.4 port, and a DP 1.2 port. While some people might want to build a compact workstation that can support up to three displays, we suspect that the HDMI 2.0 port is the one that will get most people excited. You might not need 4K at 60Hz for most media playback, but it's absolutely essential for those wanting to do some gaming or just doing day-to-day work on a high resolution monitor.

While ASUS did it first, the dual M.2 slots are another standout feature. You can install two full-speed NVMe M.2 SSDs on this tiny motherboard and potentially do away with conventional SATA drives/cables entirely. This is a huge plus in a small ITX case where space is always at a premium.

While we are on the topic of storage and connectivity, this motherboard supports up to eleven total USB ports, but it doesn't have a single USB 3.1 Gen2 port. This is difficult to accept in a mainstream motherboard released in 2018, but bizarrely this omission is duplicated by a few other competing Z370 Mini-ITX models as well. On the plus side, it does have a USB 3.0 Type-C port, so at least there is support for that next-gen connector.

The four lonely RGB LEDs mounted on the rear of the motherboard aren't really going to light up your system in any significant way, but at least GIGABYTE has included two light strip headers for those who want some more serious lighting effects. Furthermore, the newly overhauled RGB Fusion utility is absolutely fantastic, providing a seemingly unlimited number of settings and options for those who want to do more than have the lights dance to the beat of their music. On that note, the onboard audio solution is a little rudimentary since it has the same number of capacitors as it does audio jacks (3), but as the results demonstrated it does a great job of outputting a clean signal.

While the GIGABYTE Z370N WIFI is an ideal small motherboard in many respects, there are caveats as we explained above. While it is a fair bit cheaper than the competition, it still retails for $150 USD / $200 CAD, those issues really shouldn't exist in this class of motherboard. As a result, we can't give it an award, but would still recommend it to those willing to leave their processor at default settings.