Board Layout and Pictures

Having used the Gigabyte B350 for a while now, I was extremely happy to see that Asus spent a little more time on the power connection layout on the X370-I. ITX boards don’t have a lot of room so getting a traditional layout is always hard to do but they got the 24 pin up in the top right corner and the 8 pin power is in the top left. This means you don’t have to run wires across or around your memory or CPU cooler. It also looks like they left space around the CPU for good cooler compatibility as well, at least as good as you can get while still being ITX. The overall theme of the board is a typical Strix look. That means the board is dark gray or black with lines on it, all of the plastic components are black, and then the heatsinks are all dark gray. This is color neutral so it will look good in any build, especially when paired with the built-in addressable lighting on the right side of the board.

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Keeping things cool on an ITX board is also challenging because the larger your heatsinks are the less room you have for other components. So Asus did a few unique things on the X370-I. So the cooler for the power circuitry around the CPU goes vertical but isn’t very thick. This allows it to double as a partial rear I/O shield. The downside is that it looks a lot larger than it actually is, I wouldn’t expect it to handle anything crazy in overclocking, but again this is an ITX board and lots of cooling isn’t exactly available in most SFF cases as well.

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The M.2 heatsink is unique because it is floating up in the air. Asus did this because the M.2 lot is actually on a riser board, but I will get into that here in a minute. The cooler is all aluminum an extremely thick. The bottom has a full-length thermal pad as well. The ROG logo on this is backlit as well, you can see that they use a small header on the bottom to get power up to it.

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So normally I would go around and cover everything in each ¼ of the board, but because of the size of the X370-I, I’m just going to bounce around a little, starting with the M.2 riser because we already started on that. Now Asus using riser cards on their ITX boards isn’t anything unusual for them. Nearly no one else does it though, but it is a great way to take advantage of the 3-dimensional space of the ITX board to fit more features in. So this riser actually has two functions. Obviously, it has the M.2 slot on the right side, but its what I see over on the left that is the most interesting. Rather than splitting the audio circuitry off with a resin gap in the board, Asus used this riser to keep the sound card on its own. You can see the high-quality caps hiding under the heatsink mount on the left. There are also dual OP amps included. You also get impedance sensing for both the front and rear jacks and for the three rear jacks they also built-in LED lighting so you can see which is which in the darkness of a LAN. It's all running on an 8 channel S1220A CODEC.

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So up in the top half of the board, you have the 8 pin that I already mentioned in the utmost left corner. Then there are three four-pin PWM headers. A lot of the ITX boards only end up with two total fan headers so I love that Asus didn’t skimp. Then the two white headers are both RGB headers. One is a standard header an the other is addressable, both are controlled by the Aura software.

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Down the right side of the board you have two DDR4 ram DIMMs and then next to those you have most of your normal connections. The 24 pin motherboard power is at the top. Below that is the front panel I/O, it is a little tight but Asus included that easy to use cable to make it a one plug connection. Then there are two SATA connections with two more tucked on the other side of the memory. Then you have a USB 2.0 connection with a USB 3.1 next o it. There isn’t a new style USB 3.1 gen2 header, but even just getting both USB 3.1 and 2 headers is rare on ITX boards,

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Down along the bottom is the one slot that makes this all gaming ready. The PCIe x16 slot has a double wing release and a metal shield on it to help with holding strength. This is nice for LAN use because your build may be shipped or at least carried around.

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The rear I/O on the X370-I is a little thin. There aren’t any USB 2 ports but you get four blue USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports and then two red USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports. The red NIC runs on the Intel I211-AT controller and being red indicates that it has Asus’s Anti-surge LANGuard protection as well. Next to that are two wireless antenna connections for the Realtek wireless AC card built in that same box. Then next to that are the three rear audio connections. Each has an LED inside to help make connection easier. I wouldn't mind a few more USB ports personally but I do like that you get two of the new gen 2 ports that are faster than the normal 3.1 headers. Oddly enough Asus didn’t turn one of them into a Type-C though.

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The back of the PCB shows just how packed this board is. There isn’t a gap anywhere. In addition to that Asus also slipped a second M.2 up under here as well to give a total of two full x4 speed connections. Beyond that he AM4 backer plate takes up most of the rest of the PCB.

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