Need some help gents please....I have been a Gigabyte fan and owner over 15 years now, and suddenly my one supplier will not be doing Gigabyte anymore. That leaves me with Asus from them, or source Gigabyte from another vendor when they get stock. Now, my choice is Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Gaming 5 or Asus Z370 Strix-E. Seeing I can upgrade without real cost to me. Which would be the better option? Also, when doing motherboard, I will also be doing GPU, but same brand. So if I go Gigabyte, my new gpu will also be Gigabyte and same with Asus. My main problem is which one. As I have never used or had anything to do with an Asus. Main difference as per board I can see: Gigabyte Supports the following RAM types not supported by Asus: DDR4 3666MHz, 3800MHz, 4133MHz Some input will be awesome....
DDR4 4000(OC)*/ 3866(OC)*/ 3733(OC)*/ 3600(OC)*/ 3466(OC)*/ 3400(OC)*/ 3333(OC)*/ 3300(OC)*/ 3200(OC)*/ 3000(OC)*/ 2800(OC)*/ 2666/ 2400/ 2133 Those are listed on spec page. Having used Gigaybyte and ASUS boards, I much prefer ASUS. Better quality and UI in UEFI is much better which is a lot less confusing. Gigabyte also likes to do revisions which are usually less quality than original. As for what's better, it really doesn't matter. Performance won't be any different.
I'll won't spend my money for MSI or Gigabyte motherboard's. I suggest going for the Asus Prime Z370-A if you entrusted with two choices only, then watch this! Presumably, you might end up with Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Gaming.
These last generations i would select asus over gigabyte any day. Gigabyte pushes to much bling and skimping on the power phases. (I went with asrock on z370, but used asus for many years, and they got good support on bios updates and drivers).
I can't speak to the Gigabyte board, but I just used the Strix z370-E in an upgrade of my main rig and the experience was less than great. I've been brand loyal to MSI motherboards for many years but recent reviews have favored Asus VRMs so I thought I'd give them another shot (Asus was my go to vendor for more than a decade until a string of quality issues sparked a change). Overclocking my 7700k on an MSI Gaming 7 was a breeze but the Asus has real issues with fine tuning voltage IMO. LLC values, which range from 1-7 seem to be completely reversed from Asus' documentation (e.g. 1 pushes the most voltage and 7 the least). Multicore Enhancement with fully automatic voltage settings pushes VCore to absurd levels and turning ME off results in power throttling regardless of manual/offset/adaptive voltage settings. I'm running an NZXT X62, which keeps temps well below throttling territory so the throttling isn't heat related. The only way I can maintain a constant "turbo" clockspeed without killing the CPU with power, is to leave ME on, all voltage settings on auto except LLC, which can be adjusted to get close, though not precisely to your desired voltage. Even a mild 4.8GHz overclock would wildly fluctuate under load (i.e. running Prime95 would cause the individual cores to continually adjust between 3.7-4.8GHz), regardless of the any other voltage adjustments I made. Perhaps this is all down to my ignorance of Asus UEFI, Coffe Lake power nuances or both, but I've been doing this a long time and this is the first build since I stopped using jumpers to set IRQs that has me truly stumped.
Weird it sounds like your vrm is overheating to me but you have a 10 phase vrm. My guess is either you’re running an old bios or it’s a faulty board. You might have really bad airflow in your case having a dual fan cooler doesn’t necessarily mean you have good airflow, some people can be really ignorant and rude when bad airflow is mentioned but I’m sure you’re not one of them
I appreciate the input. I updated to the latest UEFI (dated 2017-11-01) before turning a single knob. As far as poor airflow is concerned, I suppose it's possible but I highly doubt it. There are two 140mm fans directly above the VRM exhausting heat from the top of the case moreover, the VRM would be the only component in thermal distress as every other temp sensor is where I would expect it. More importantly, the power throttling issue only happens when attempting to manually configure voltage settings. Leaving settings to "Auto" works without issue, no throttling and stable under load, excepting that it's pushing more power than I'm comfortable with to the cores unless I adjust LLC (which I'm doing). The problem is that I don't have granular enough control with this method and would like to dial in the voltage a little more.
Another option could be the Z370 Extreme, has decent VRMs and the asrock bios are generally pretty good.
