ASUS ROG Strix Z370 G Gaming Review

Up Close

It doesn’t seem that long ago that every heatsink you saw on a motherboard was just a boring chunk of aluminium, but since the first Sandy Bridge motherboards saw manufacturers stretch their creative side so we’ve got used to judging a motherboard at first glance on the basis of the heatsink complexity. ASUS themselves started the recent trend of blending the MOSFET heatsinks into the IO section, and whilst the G Gaming doesn’t reach those heights it clearly looks like a more serious piece of kit than the iTX did purely on the basis of the higher quality heatsink design.

  
  

Despite the compact dimensions there is plenty of space around the hardware on the bottom side of the Z370 G. The expandability afforded by an extra full size PCI slot matches up well to the two PCI x1 slots. The logo on the chipset cooler is full RGB so you can add the personal touch if you so desire, something which was lacking on the iTX.

  

Whilst there is more room on an mATX than an iTX, there are still places where you can see how limited the space is. Tiny fingers are necessary to plug in the 12v CPU power and careful cable routing for the CPU fans which are tucked up next to the DIMM slots.

  

You’d have to have a particularly large collection of storage drives to fill up the six SATA ports available on the ASUS Z370 G Gaming, The days when you had to fiddle about with jumpers on the back of hard drives in the hopes of managing to run two drives on the same system are a dim and distant memory.

  

Lastly around the back we find a couple of display outputs in the shape of an HDMI and a DisplayPort, along with plenty of USB ports in all types, WiFi antenna mounts, the always handy LAN port and even a PS/2 connector for those of you with favourite old peripherals.