The ASRock Z370 Gaming-ITX/ac Motherboard Review: Mini-ITX with Thunderbolt 3
by Joe Shields on July 13, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gaming
- Intel
- ASRock
- Mini ITX
- 802.11ac
- Wi-Fi
- Coffee Lake
- Z370
- i7-8700K
Gaming Performance
AoTS Escalation
Ashes of the Singularity is a Real Time Strategy game developed by Oxide Games and Stardock Entertainment. The original AoTS was released back in March of 2016 while the standalone expansion pack, Escalation, was released in November of 2016 adding more structures, maps, and units. We use this specific benchmark as it relies on both a good GPU as well as on the CPU in order to get the most frames per second. This balance is able to better display any system differences in gaming as opposed to a more GPU heavy title where the CPU and system don't matter quite as much. We use the default "Crazy" in-game settings using the DX11 rendering path in both 1080p and 4K UHD resolutions. The benchmark is run four times and the results averaged then plugged into the graph.
The Gaming-ITX/ac manages to fall right in the middle of this test proving capable as the others are in this title. Our AOTSe results are all VERY close together with ~2 FPS separating both the 1080p and 4K results.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013's Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.
One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 3 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
Rise of the Tomb Raider results for the Z370 Gaming-ITX/ac also doesn't show anything out of the ordinary with its results landing at the peak of the bell curve.
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timecop1818 - Saturday, July 14, 2018 - link
Ask the same question to all the retards whining about 4-lane thunderbolt shit in laptops. Most of them will never even own a single TB3 peripheral, never mind one that would actually require 40Gb/s of bandwidth.The_Assimilator - Friday, July 13, 2018 - link
Would've been nice if they'd rotated the two SATA ports closest to the CPU socket by 180 degrees, so that you can unclip latching SATA cables.The_Assimilator - Friday, July 13, 2018 - link
Also could've done with a few more USB 3.0 ports on the back panel.vortexmak - Friday, July 13, 2018 - link
Kudos to ASRock and their plethora of features.However, it is missing a USB 3.1 header, those should be standard now.
Also, I don't know if an M.2 slot on the back is a good idea , since M.2 drives seem to require heatsinks
Mr Perfect - Wednesday, July 18, 2018 - link
There is a USB3 header between the DIMM slots and the two SATA ports, lower left hand corner.CharonPDX - Friday, July 13, 2018 - link
Does the BIOS support enabling SGX? Is this motherboard capable of playing UHD Blu-ray?If so, this is the perfect small-form-factor motherboard.
Galcobar - Friday, July 13, 2018 - link
If you're going to copy-paste a paragraph into every Intel motherboard review, maybe make sure it's not one with a typo:Page one, section Information on Intel's Coffee-Lake CPU Desktop Processors
"... Cutress reviewed a couple of processors (i7-8700K and i7-8400) ..." -- i5-8400.
"... cross compatible ..." -- cross-compatible.
Joe Shields - Monday, July 16, 2018 - link
Thanks for the critical eye. This has (finally) been updated. :)OFelix - Friday, July 13, 2018 - link
@Editor:Anandtech has taught us that "USB 3.1" is meaningless unless "Gen 1" or "Gen 2" is specified.
Yet this article uses the term 7 times without clarification.
Galcobar - Saturday, July 14, 2018 - link
Apparently it's left to the author's discretion and Joe, unlike as far as I can tell every other writer on Anandtech, does not follow the USB Implementers Forum convention laid down in 2013.I grumped about this on the last motherboard review, and received this response from Joe: https://www.anandtech.com/comments/12656/gigabyte-...