I am waiting for the Asus' Z370-A information.
It seems for most people that is the baseline board.
As far as the other boards, I think Asrock's K6 / Extreme4 / Taichi trio are good value. The difference is the Taichi has the Hyper BCLK feature that adds cost. The K6 appears to have power/reset/Debug LED so that's a good sign on top of the 60A chokes and "DSM" marketing drivel that is likely TI NexFETs.
edit: also the Asrock K6 / Extreme4 / Taichi / Fatal1ty Pro Gaming i7 (stupid long name) all have two BIOS chips, although likely due to branding they can't call it Dual BIOS.
The specifications list "2 x 128Mb AMI UEFI Legal BIOS with multilingual GUI support (1 x Main BIOS and 1 x Backup BIOS)"
Unless the Asrock K6 veers sharply away from previous price points, it will likely be a ~ $160-180 board on par with the Asus Z370-A in pricing. The Extreme4 was lower than the K6 at around $160 (although the Z270 one used Sinopowers) and the Taichi was ~$220 for Z270.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
GBT-MatthewH
Alas I don't have a board in front of me, but I am reading off a spec sheet from our R&D... 99% sure the review is wrong because it should be 8+3, not 8+2. I also have ISL 6625A listed. My guess is they got an early engineering sample and not a final board.
Pretty much the entire stack is 95866 + 6625. Top-mid range is 8+3, mid-entry level is 4+3.
A bit disingenuous since it's using doublers to achieve the "8+3". Anyhow, unless Gigabyte gets their act together with respect to midrange boards , I suspect Asrock and ASUS will be the boards to buy for the Z370 platform. Gigabyte boards at the high end are decent, but they're laden with RGB garbage and not really good price/perf.
The Z370 platform isn't a longterm socket, so I think for most users the best bet is to get a low-midrange board with USB 3.1 gen 2 , ALC1220, Thunderbolt support (the main reason to go Intel over AMD) , half decent VRM (unless delidding), and a Debug LED if possible for troubleshooting. From what I see, the Gigabyte boards except the Gaming 7 and Gaming 5 are using On Semi parts that can only push about 25A without heating up. (the Lab501 review has 4C06N it appears)
I understand that most of the "gaming" userbase wouldn't know an inductor if it slapped them in the face. However, Gigabyte has to realize that these Coffee Lake CPUs are going to be more power hungry than the Kaby Lake CPUs.
On the geizhals.eu price comparison tool , the Gigabyte Gaming 7 is showing up as € 355.65 , while the Gaming 5 is listed as € 297.69. ShopBLT shows the Gaming 7 at $271.29 and the Gaming 5 at $219.54.