ASRock Z370 Pro4

First swallow

ASRock Z370 Pro4 is a representative of an early wave of motherboards for Intel Coffee Lake processors, which, with the de jure unchanged LGA1151 socket, are de facto supported only by 300-series chipsets. It is important to note that in order to support the Core i3, you will first have to update the BIOS firmware, while the i5 and i7 work out of the box, as they say. Four DDR4 DIMM slots support memory modules up to 4266 MHz (if more than one is installed, the maximum frequency will be reduced).

An abundance of connectors

Two PCI-E x16 slots allow you to organize a bunch of AMD CrossFireX video cards, but not NVIDIA SLI (the limitation is purely software, there are no hardware reasons for this). In addition, there are three PCI-E x1 slots and one "old-school" PCI for connecting network, sound and video recording cards. The disk subsystem can be built from six classic SATA drives and two newfangled M.2 drives (including high-speed Intel Optane). The third M.2 slot (shortened) is designed exclusively for the notebook Wi-Fi adapter.

Overpayment for false start

The ASRock Z370 Pro4 costs about $140, which seems to be a lot, but due to the temporary lack of models on lower chipsets, it is one of the most affordable solutions on the market. We recommend it to everyone who builds a computer on Coffee Lake, except, perhaps, avid overclockers. Due to the relatively small size of the mosfet heatsink, this motherboard will definitely not be able to demonstrate record overclocking rates for CPU.