GIGABYTE Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming (rev. 1.0) LGA 1151 (300 Series) Intel Z370 HDMI USB 3.1 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: DDR4 support up to 4000mhz (oc)
Dual M2 slots (up to 32gb/s)
Amp Up Audio and smart headphone amp
Smart Fan 5 Cooling
3 way crossfire, 2 way sli support
Ultra durable armour
Attractive Black and White theme
Support for RGB
Metal reinforced PCI-e slots
Optane ready
Intel Gigabyte LAN
Dual Bios
Easy bios to navigate
App Center and easy tune software
7 x USB 3 ports and 1 x USB type C on rear IO
G-connector
3 year warranty
Silly price

Cons: Only supports 8th Gen Intel LGA 1151 cpu’s
Not the best implementation of ALC 1220 audio
RGB strips need to be purchased

Overall Review: This will be the 10th pc I’ve built in the last 5 or 6 months. Mainly for family and friends. I’ve used various cpu’s and chipsets, but this pc build was my first with a new 8th gen 6 core 8400 cpu. And I am extremely impressed. This pc was going to replace the X370 mother and Ryzen 1600 cpu that I used in my sons last build. Both he and I were not overly happy with the stability of that platform, so back to Intel we went. I was lucky enough to find an 8400 cpu and paired it with speedy pc 3000 DDR4 ram and this motherboard. My son went for this motherboard because of the black and white theme, which he told me looked cool. I agreed, but was also impressed with all of the features that this basic motherboard came with and the silly price (after rebate). By far this is the cheapest Z370 motherboard with ALC 1220 sound, but to be honest it does not sound as good as my other Gigabyte Aorus Z370 motherboard with ALC 1220, perhaps because this board skimps out on the WIMA capacitors?

The pc was built in 30 mins and the reinforced PCI-e slot fully supported my sons GTX 980Ti without any sagging.

The board comes with Dual Bios, so if an overclock or bios flash goes badly the board is not completely bricked as you can boot in to Windows using the backup bios. The bios was easy to navigate in using keyboard and mouse and comes with the new Smart Fan 5 which is excellent and allows me to create custom fan profiles easily.

Once I installed the hardware, I was able to boot to the bios to tweak a few settings including ram speed and from there I booted in to the existing Windows 10 install on my sons SSD. I easily uninstalled the old AMD chipset drivers along with the video card drivers, rebooted again, cleaned up the windows system files using CCleaner and then reinstalled the new Z370 drivers along with the latest video card drivers. After one more reboot I was up and running without issue, everything worked perfectly. While I generally prefer a complete reinstall of Windows, an update from Ryzen to Z370 really did not necessitate this IMO.

This motherboard comes with all of the important features I think are necessary for forward thinking and longevity in a new pc, including Realtek’s new ALC 1220 audio, crossfire and sli support, M2 support (up to 32Gb/s), Intel GbE LAN and USB 3.1 (type A and C). Although it does not come with any RGB, RGB is still supported in the bios and software app once an RGB LED strip is purchased and connected to the motherboard header.

I decided on the intel core i5 8400 as this is a 6 core cpu running at a base rate of 2.8ghz and boost rate of 4.0ghz on a single core. It’s not a K cpu, so I will not be overclocking. Having said this, the Gigabyte motherboard has multicore enhancement functionality in the bios. This forces the cpu to run all cores at maximum boosted parameters when under load. In the case of the 8400, all cores boost to 3.8ghz. Performance is very strong.

The motherboard was flawless, setup was easy, no issues. My son is happy with his upgraded pc and I must admit that this motherboard looks very cool. I added an RGB strip for some added ‘bling’.
Very happy. The 3 year warranty and the price after rebate made me happier.

Pros: - Good overall board layout with plenty of fan headers and USB 3.1 front panel headers

Cons: Have to update BIOS immediately if using M.2 SSD: I recently used this board for a new build (Intel i-8700, Corsair RMx850 power supply, EVGA GTX 960 video card, Plextor M8se 512 GB SSD, WD Black 4 TB HD, Arctic Liquid Freezer 240, Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 16 GB DDR4 2400 Memory) and the system would get stuck at the posting screen. After being on the phone with Gigabyte for an hour and disconnecting every single component from the motherboard other than a single stick of RAM and the CPU, we discovered that the problem was that the BIOS version the MB shipped with (F2) would not allow the MB to read my M.2 SSD. We flashed the BIOS to the newest version (F5l) which corrected the issue and now the computer boots up just fine.

Overall Review: None