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Since Coffee Lake’s launch in October the lack of budget motherboards has made recommending the budget i3 8100 and other locked chips a hard sell, with many waiting patiently for the H370 and H310 motherboards since the point of entry for a Z370 was around $120. Today we know the wait shouldn’t be much longer.
The Coffee is Getting Cold
German site HardwareLuxx has leaked and then taken down later that day the Gigabyte H370 AORUS Gaming 3 WiFi, it features 6 PCIe slots, with dual PCIe X16 slots and four PCIe x1 slots, which may entice miners to pick this board up. The Gigabyte H370 AORUS Gaming 3 also has two M.2 slots, with only one equipped with a heat spreader. The motherboard also features onboard WiFi connected to a Mini PCIe slot beneath the second x16 slot which will be determined later exactly what kind of card it uses.
The board is fully RGB and I imagine it will support RGB Fusion and has the RAM slots, audio chipset I/O and the south bridge all illuminated with fully RGB lights the whole way around. I would also expect more VRMs from International Rectifier, even though it does not allow overclocking, this may be for future high end Intel 8 core Coffee Lake CPUs that will be releasing this summer.
As we reported a few months ago the H370, B360 and H310 motherboards are expected to hit store shelves some time in April, which may be too little too late, as many consumers in the low to mid ranged price brackets have gone with an AMD Ryzen system. For almost 6 months now, with shortages from launch until Christmas and the lack of CPU and motherboard options, Intel has put itself in a bit of a rough spot for the budget minded consumer. Hopefully the launch of these boards should allow more competition between the two companies in all price brackets.
