Affordable Kaby Lake motherboards: H270 and B250 in the spotlight

Looking for a new motherboard to accompany an Intel 7th-gen CPU? Josh Collins is here to help you keep the balance and not smash the budget.

For many PC owners — even enthusiasts and pros — the increased feature set and performance found from Intel’s Z-series motherboards goes well above their daily computing needs. They may have no desire for overclocking, or consider the increased memory bandwidth (and accompanying RAM frequencies) available on a Z270 to be of little benefit. Those are the two core differentiators for most users considering whether to buy a Z270 solution or opt for an option based on either H270 or B250. However, there are a few more considerations often overlooked during the purchasing process. To ensure you’re well informed and ready to make the right purchase for your needs, we intend to clarify some of these considerations. Let’s get stuck into it!

KNOWING YOUR H AND B FROM YOUR Z

The first item to be mindful of is the overall PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes available to the platform from the PCH. The Z270 sports a total of 24 lanes and is the maximum for the consumer platform; need more and you’ll need to shift to the High-End Desktop (HEDT) platform (the X99). Next in line is the H270 chipset, featuring 20 lanes of PCIe Gen 3.0 connectivity, followed by the B250 platform with 12 lanes. These PCIe lanes are arranged into the Flex-IO to facilitate HSIO (High-Speed I/O) connectivity — that’s used for graphics cards, sound cards and other add-ons through PCIe slots, and onboard devices like gigabit network interfaces and so on — as well as being shared across other platform storage resources such as M.2, U.2 and SATA, or additional USB 3.0/3.1 connectivity. All three of the core consumer chipsets, Z270, H270 and B250, feature a stock SATA 6Gbps port count of six — additional ports are served by a controller hub and consume PCIe lane allocation from the Flex-IO.

On the USB connectivity front, Z270 will feature 10 or more USB 3.0 ports, while this connectivity steps down to eight and six for H270 and B250, respectively. The total number of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports are 14 for Z270 and H270 and 12 for B250. This includes both rear I/O placements and connections facilitated by internal, onboard headers — such as for front panel connectivity.

STORAGE & GAMING

Users wanting to ride the NVMe storage wave should also be aware of the maximum number of PCIe RST drives possible on each platform. From the top down, that’s three, two and one for Z270, H270 and B250, respectively. On this note, the H270 platform may also reduce the lane allocation on one of the M.2 ports from PCIe x4 to x2 to reallocate the resources elsewhere. This means that, if you want to run a NVMe PCIe x4 RAID configuration, be sure to double check that the motherboard supports both ports running at x4, rather than an x4 + x2 combo.

If multi-GPU configurations are your jam, you’ll need to stick to Z270 for best results. H270 and B250 don’t support SLI due to the secondary PCIe graphics slot running at x4 speed and SLI requiring x8 as a minimum — however, the two lower-end chipsets can support AMD’s CrossFire due to minimum x4 speed requirement.

Now we’ve covered the ins and outs of what each platform provides, let’s dive into the actual motherboards.

MISSING IN ACTION

We extended an invitation to ASRock to submit some motherboards for this feature, but unfortunately samples were unable to be provided in time for inclusion, thus we’ve not been able to review any here. We hope to look at some of the vendor’s B250 and H270 offerings as standalone reviews a bit further down the track.