I am going to buy an Intel Core i7-8700K. I currently have an Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.5 GHz (using a standard 240mm liquid cooler), which is only a modest overclock, and I intend to do an equally modest overclock on the i7-8700K. Just something light. It turns out there are a lot of Z370 motherboards up to £150! I've made the following table: Any suggestions? Or perhaps extra column or two I can add, to differentiate between them all?
The only brand that comes to mind, which I see you haven't listed is the NZXT Z370 Motherboards'. NZXT N7 Z370 Motherboard & Product Page priced at 300 $. So that would be, 217£..And that goes beyond your budget. You could give pcpartpicker a try and find a Z370 board that interests you, change the currency to £ and sort by price: Pcpartpicker.com Z370
The NZXT N7 Z37XT is £330 from Scan. Not exactly up to £150, is it? That website is very nice! Very filterable Thank you.
Yeah, I posted the message and then re-read the title . Thought I could make a speedy edit to my post before you saw ^^.
I've noticed you need to pay a little extra before you start getting USB 3.1 ports (which came out in 2013).
I would just go with one with the most power phases for vrm. The asrock pro4 and msi tomahawk got 10. With 10 you should be able to get the max clock out of the cpu and only the silicon lottery and memory will be the deciding factor. This is the line up if you want to compare. https://wccftech.com/intel-z370-motherboard-roundup-asus-msi-asrock-aorus-gigabyte/2/
I have a Prime A myself. It is pretty good and allowed me to overclock my 8700k @4800 at only 1.22 volts (I have a CM Evo 120 as a cooler right now so I'm trying to keep temps down until I get a NoctuaD15). My main gripe with the Prime (and probably just Asus boards in general) is that I had to manually adjust the vcore, vccio, and vccsa voltages as Asus auto is crazy high. Otherwise it is solid and is a well spaced and thought-out board. The audio is stellar, and was one of the main reasons I chose this board as I decided to get away from using my PCIx Xonar. Oh, and it can fit the NoctuaD15 or any giant cooler pretty easily which is always a plus if you don't go for water cooling. My last board was an Asrock Extreme 6 (3770k) and was much easier with the overclock, I kept voltages all auto. So I think Asrock might be better at their voltage calculations, but I haven't had any of their recent boards. Edit: I'm at 1.22 volts (hits about 1.23 in heavier use)
I'm also looking for a Coffee Lake board, mATX that is. Can't find any info on the amount of Power Phases I'll have overclocked, custom water-cooled 8350K (probably mosfet and chipset too) with 16GB ram, later upgrade to 8700K or what ever the future brings. At least one M2 for OS and apps. GIGABYTE Z370M-D3H vs MSI Z370M GAMING PRO AC Gigabyte is much better on the BIOS update side, just the price worries me a bit.