Here's A Roundup Of Intel 300 Series Coffee Lake Motherboards From ASUS, ASRock, And Gigabyte
ASUS by far has the most extensive lineup of new motherboards using the H370 and B360 chipsets spread across ROG Strix, TUF Gaming, and Prime product families. The ROG Strix family motherboards have headers for RGB strips, Aura Sync, and pre-mounted I/O shields. Other features prominent within the family include SafeSlot reinforcements to protect your motherboard from damage due to massive graphics cards, dual M.2 slots, Intel GbE, Intel dual-band Wi-Fi with MU-MIMO support, and SupremeFX audio.
The TUF Gaming family have distinct militaristic styling themes throughout and military-grade electrical components (in addition to ESD guards for fending off damage from electrostatic discharge). The TUF H370-Pro Gaming and TUF B360-Pro Gaming are the only two entries in this product family, and they both feature dual M.2 slots, Turbo LAN prioritization, onboard RGB headers, and are available in Wi-Fi editions.
Finally, the Prime brand is represented by one model: the Prime H370M-PLUS. This microATX board has a muted design theme, four DDR4-2666 memory slots, Fan Xpert 4 Core cooling (with fan and pump auto-detection), a secondary PCIe x16 slot.
You can see the ASUS's full H370 and B360 lineup below:
Moving on to Gigabyte, it is delivering the H370 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi and B360 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi motherboards. Both motherboards of course have supports for the latest 8th generation Intel Core desktop processors and incorporate Intel 2x2 MI-MUMO 802.11ac Wi-Fi along with Bluetooth 5.0. With Wave 2 technology, the onboard Wi-Fi is capable of delivering throughout of up to 1.73Gbps. Realtek ALC1220-VB audio is now onboard, and you'll find two M.2 slots; one of which features a Thermal Guard to tamp down the effects of thermal throttling.
Other features include Smart Fan 5 along with dual hybrid fan headers, RGB Fusion Technology with onboard LEDs (and support for 5V or 12V Lighting strips). Intel Optane memory is also supported if you want to get an added system performance boost with a 32GB memory module. The H370 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi also has the added benefit of a Hybrid 8+2 Phase PWM design to improve efficiency. We should note that there will also be non-Wi-Fi models of both motherboards available, and Gigabyte will announce even more members to the family in the coming weeks.
On the ASRock side of things, there are there are four motherboards being introduced. There's the B360 Fatal1ty Gaming K4, H370 Fatal1ty Performance, H370M Pro4, and the H310M HDVP/M.2. The former two are standard ATX boards, while the latter two are microATX. ASRock has upgraded its CPU VRM designs on thee motherboards to provide more power phases and improve stability, and you'll find support for Key-E Type M.2 Wi-Fi expansion cards. ASRock Polychrome RGB LED header technology is also supported for gamer that want to add a bit more visual flare to their gaming rigs.
Unfortunately, ASRock has not yet provided pricing or availability for its new 300 Series motherboards.
