Next-gen Ryzen CPUs might be around the corner but I can’t forget about the X370 ITX board that Asus sent over a while back. While the AM4 boards launched early last year, ITX took a while longer. So even with new CPUs on the way if you are looking to build small form factor you will most likely still need to go X370 initially. So I’m excited both to finally see what Asus has to offer for AM4 ITX and to see how it compares to the Gigabyte AB350N board that I’ve been using all over the office. But I’m also hoping the Strix X370-I Gaming is a solid board that will let me build a crazy second gen Ryzen build when they finally come out as well.

Product Name: Asus ROG Strix X370-I Gaming

Review Sample Provided by: Asus

Written by: Wes Compton

Pictures by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

specifications

 


Packaging and Accessories

The box for the Strix X370-I Gaming isn’t really anything different than the Intel Strix boards. There is a photo of the board right on the front and I love when they do this because who cares about a weird design on the front when you want to know what the board looks like. Then behind that, the background is black with a neon-like ROG logo. They do have the AM4 socket info along the bottom along with the X370 chipset information that is also in the product name. Then around back there is another photo of the board, only this time from directly above and then again at an angle to show the rear I/O. This is put next to a specification listing. It stood out to me how the picture in the front shows darker colored heatsinks and the back photos look silver. Beyond that, they do highlight special features with additional pictures along the bottom, but this is an ITX board so the box is small and there is a limited amount of room available.

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Inside the box is another box because boxes. In it the board it up top inside of a cardboard tray. It has a partial cover as well keeping it from moving around. Then down below it, Asus packed the small ITX box with accessories. For documentation, you get a full user guide. Along with it, they include a set of ROG stickers. The sticker sheet now includes color-coded cable tags that used to come on a different sheet. Then you get a driver/software disc and because of their partnership with Cablemod, you get a discount code. I’ve left ours in the open so someone who needs cables or lighting can use it.

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For accessories, you get a lot more than most other ITX boards. For starters, you have the rear I/O panel. Asus blacked this one out except for the labels. It uses a foam backer design so no metal springs to get caught on things. Then for cables, you get two bags of SATA cables for a total of four and an extension cable for addressable LEDs using the built-in header. The last cable is a short front I/O cable that lets you hook all of your cables up out of your SFF case and then plug in just one connection. Asus also included M.2 screws and a bag of zip ties. You don’t normally see zip ties with a motherboard, but considering PSUs and cases don’t come with enough it is a cheap and welcome addition.

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Last but not least they also included the antenna for the built-in wireless AC. This design isn’t magnetic like past Asus antennas but the slim design does look good. The bottom stand can be removed but you will need it to keep the antenna vertical. In fact, the stand base needs to have more weight or more width to really keep this in place. I think I would prefer the older design with magnets or something I could hang from the wall.

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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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BIOS

In a lot of cases, the difference in a good experience and a bad one with motherboards for me has been in the software. A lot of companies can put together a decent feature list, but software development is expensive and doesn’t immediately translate to sales so a lot of companies skimp on it. For the most part though Asus has led the charge on this bot with their BIOS and windows based software. To take a look at their BIOS I’ve done a basic walk through that shows each option and setting available at the time of our review.

So how is the UEFI? Well, once again I was surprised that I first booted into the Advanced Mode when they have an EzMode available. The EzMode basically limits what you can adjust to a few basic aspects like drag and drop boot order, turning on XMP or in this case DOCP (AMP for AMD), and you can turn on EZ Tunes.

Moving back to the Advanced Mode Asus has still kept the traditional layout so anyone who prefers a keyboard navigation can still do that but you do still get the mouse. Speaking of, the movement is smooth and doesn’t feel out of sync like most other UEFIs have issues with. So the main tab basically just shows you the current revisions, what hardware you have, and the time. You can also change the language here.

Ai Tweaker is Asus’s overclocking section. This is where you will find any CPU and memory overclocking options as well as all power/voltage control. The amount of detail you can get into gets a little crazy, you will notice it took me a little while to flip through all of the pages.

Then any option that isn’t overclocking related is all put in the Advanced tab. This includes other CPU settings, anything built into the motherboard, and stuff like USB/Hard drives/network. Each of the main options has folders within folders as well. Then from there, you have the monitor tab. This is just a listing of every sensor readout. You can also make a few Qfan setting changes here. I don’t know why these just aren’t in the Qfan Control option up top.

The Boot section is exactly what you would expect. This is where you can change the UEFI and PC boot options including boot order and how your PC will recover after the power goes out. Next is the Tool tab and this is where you will find a few useful tools. The biggest is the EZ Flash 3 utility. This is how you update the BIOS. What sets this apart is the ability to be able to download a new BIOS update while in the BIOS or the option to be able to look through your OS files to find a BIOS update you downloaded. No need for a flash drive with this setup. You also get Secure Erase if you need to really clear an old hard drive. There are a few info pages that just give more details on things like your video card and then there is the overclocking profile page. This gives you 8 profiles where you can backup different overclock configurations. This is nice for allowing you to safe known good overclocks while you play with new setups or saving good overclocks depending on the time of year.

Also up along the top, there is Qfan where you can adjust fan profiles to tune them for better performance or lower noise. Then the EZ Tuning Wizard is an easy to use overclocking tool that will do a basic overclock for you. This has improved over the years, now it asks how you will be using the computer and what kind of cooling you currently have. Then it gives you an estimate before running. Our 1800X would see about 5% with an air cooler and 8% with water cooling. Not exactly a huge jump, at 8% that would be 4.32 compared to the 4.0 XFR.

 


Test Rig and Procedures

AMD X370 Test System

CPU: AMD Ryzen R7 1800X - Live Pricing

Cooling: Noctua NH-U14S for cooling - Live Pricing

 Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing

Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2x8 16GB 3000MHz - Live Pricing

Storage: Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD - Live Pricing

Video Card: Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti - Live Pricing

Power Supply: Thermaltake 850w - Live Pricing

Case: Microcool Banchetto 101 Testbench - Live Pricing

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing

tests

 

 


Performance

For performance testing, I’ve mentioned it a lot in the past but it’s always good to post up a reminder. The performance between different motherboards really isn’t big unless you have one company overclocking or underclocking the CPU. So most of the testing below is just to keep everyone on the up and up and make sure there aren’t any issues. First though, here are our CPUz readouts so that everyone can see our exact configuration and BIOS revision.

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So normally I would have numbers to compare the X370-I with and I did originally. I decided in the middle of my testing though that I didn’t want to test this board with the RX480 that I did all of our original AM4 testing with. It was a little too out of date and didn’t really fit with the 1800X that I was testing with so I pulled It out and retested with the GTX 1080Ti. A high-end GPU to go with a high-end CPU and motherboard combination. The X370-I isn’t like the B350 boards, Asus has all of the overclocking options available in the BIOS so I expect people looking to go this direction might be looking to build something a little crazy.

Anyhow as far as performance went, the X370-I paired with the 1800X and the 1080Ti is a potent combination. Performance in a modern game like Ghost Recon: Wildlands being up at 120 FPS shows that and the 3DMark and PCMark scores confirm it. But we know the CPU and GPU play a big role in both of those. So how did the board do in the network test? I was a little concerned when I figured out that Asus went with Realtek for the wireless card. They normally stick with Intel. Well the Intel NIC did well as expected. Wireless performance was about on par as well, but being in a new office it remains to be seen if this number (that would top the charts in our old office) is low or high compared to other wireless configurations.  I did note in our earlier talk about the antenna that it does have a hard time staying up and doesn’t have any way to mount up away from your desk, so that will also play a role in how well the wireless performance is for some people.

perf

 


Overall and Final Verdict

While the excitement of AM4 finally having ITX boards has gone away a little bit for me now, every time I use one of the AM4 ITX boards it has been easy to find things that could be improved. For a lot of them, it was because they hurried to get the motherboards out and others have just been designed to be a lower budget board for them at the time upcoming APU launches. Well with the Asus Strix X370-I Gaming I think a lot of that has changed. For starters, Asus didn’t even include display connections because this isn’t designed to be a small budget build board. This is their X370 flagship ITX board and you can tell.

For starters in the UEFI they have left all of the overclocking options available and while I think there are limitations on the cooling potential of the board this is going to be the best option for overclocking Ryzen in an ITX form factor. More importantly, they actually laid the power connections out in locations that are easy to reach. In fact, it's not just the 24-pin and 8-pin, every connection is right on the edge of the board and easy to get too. Good wire management will go well with the standard Strix styling. That means a color neutral theme and the built-in addressable RGB lighting under the board and on the M.2 cooler. You also get an original RGB header and a new addressable one as well to let you get creative with your lighting if you want. Of course, it all looks good even when the lighting is turned off.

Speaking of looking good, the M.2/Audio riser setup that Asus went with is awesome. They managed to slip in both a second x4 M.2 and completely separated audio without taking up any space on the motherboard. I also really like that the audio connections (while only three of them) all have LEDs lights inside of them that light up to let you know where they are and what each plug is. Hooking up audio is always the least exciting part about hooking a PC up. Especially at a dark LAN party or back behind a desk.

Nothings perfect right? Well the X370-I did have a few things I would love to see improved on. For starters, and really this applies to almost every motherboard, I think it could use a few more USB ports. USB 2’s would be fine, I just hate to have to use a USB hub to get everything hooked up. I do like that you get two of the new USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports though. One Type-C would have been nice though. For the wireless, the performance was good. But I was surprised to see Asus not use Intel, they typically use Intel on all of their boards. I also think the included antenna could use some improvement to be able to stand up on its own better and have a few mounting options like a wall mount.

As for pricing, well I wasn’t really sure what the actual price of the X370-I is. Currently, you can buy it for $229 on Amazon but when looking at Newegg they have it listed for $189.99 normally but it's not in stock. At either price, it is the most expensive X370 ITX board on the market, but with it also being the best board as well that isn’t too big of a stretch. Paired up with a current Ryzen CPU and a fast video card (if you can find one) this setup is one of the only ways to get an 8 core CPU in an ITX form factor. Sure there is an X299 ITX board, but this setup has a lot fewer sacrifices. The hardest decision for me is if I should build an ITX build now with the 1800X or should I wait for the second gen Ryzen CPUs, one consistent is that the Strix X370-I will get used either way.

fv5

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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