INTEL Z370 MOTHERBOARDS

Intel’s finally gone beyond four cores with its new mainstream 8th-gen CPUs, but to put ‘em to use, you’ll need a new motherboard. The APC team test eight to find the best options.

Intel’s finally gone beyond four cores with its new mainstream 8th-gen CPUs, but to put ‘em to use, you’ll need a new motherboard.

Oh, Intel, you’ve done it again. Despite rumours that the 8th-gen Core CPUs would be compatible with the older Z270 chipset, once again buyers of new Intel chips also have to upgrade their motherboard. The new Z370 chipset is mandatory if you want to run Intel’s latest CPUs, which basically doubles the cost of upgrading to the new chips.

Z370 still uses the Socket 1151 form factor, though, which means it’s at least compatible with existing Intel coolers. Despite being an identical-looking socket, it’s actually had more power delivered to the new chips, up from 128 VCC pins on the Z270 to 146.

The Z370 still has 24 lanes from the chipset and 16 dedicated to graphics, delivering an identical 40 to the Z270. It likewise has the same number of SATA 3 ports (six native), USB ports, and there’s no sign of USB 3.2, just the usual 3.1 Gen 2. It’s still using dual channel memory, with four slots, which now runs at DDR4-2666, up from DDR4-2400 in the Z270, a very minor increase. There’s obviously support for Intel’s Optane cache technology, though that doesn’t seem to have been the hit that Intel expected. Most of the ‘boards we tested using this chipset have the same audio chipset as the bulk of Z270s, as well — Realtek’s ALC1220.

Basically, the only major change to Z370 is in the power configuration, as the six-cored CPUs need more juice to power the extra two cores. Our major disappointment is the lack of extra PCIe lanes, as with the ever growing number of M.2 SSDs drives and high speed USB ports, we’re quickly running out of places to plug in our peripherals.

So how about those new CPUs? Formerly codenamed Coffee Lake, the 8th-gen Core CPUs are aiming to take the fight back to AMD where it hurts — multiple cores. We haven’t seen AMD be this competitive for a long time, and Intel is in a bit of a mess about catching back up.

The below chart shows the new CPUs, and how Intel has increased the core count. Only the top two have 12 threads, as the i5s have had HyperThreading disabled. Intel claims up to a 43% performance increase in the six-cored chips compared to the prior 7th-gen Core i5 and i7, but there’s a catch. This increase is only true when running multithreaded applications that can make use of every single core and thread. When running a single thread, the performance increase is much smaller, measuring just 3% faster in our Cinebench single-thread benchmark. This is because Intel hasn’t focused on increasing IPC per core — the goal with this chip was to simply get more cores out there to take on Ryzen, with a slight frequency boost.

The K versions of the CPUs allow percore overclocking, but we’ve seen this implemented on motherboards in the past. The integrated GPU is identical to Kaby Lake, but with a small speed boost.

As you can see, there’s really not much new here other than the extra cores. The fact that Intel is re-releasing it with an improved architecture but under the same name shows just how much impact AMD’s Ryzen has had on the CPU market. It’s a wonderful thing to finally see Intel’s CPU monopoly over, and it will be very interesting to see how Intel counters throughout 2018. Until then, though, it appears that AMD’s Ryzen 7 is still the best option for serious multithreaders, while Intel has the lead in apps that only use a few cores.

Let’s take a look now at eight ‘boards that are based on the new chipset. We’ve gone for a generally mainstream price, so be warned — they’re all quite similar, and performance was so close between them that we’ve dropped the usual benchmark charts, too.