EVGA Z370 FTW Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

My first impression of this board is pretty positive, and it’s easily one of the better-looking motherboards on the market. It’s not too over the top, but aesthetically, it makes a strong statement thanks to that large heatsink cover on the top left.

EVGA care about you getting things right. There are detailed instructions, telling you which slots to use, which voltages they recommend and more. The pros likely don’t give a damn and will break the rules, but newcomers to the platform will be happy for the help.

The VRM cooling is beastly, with towering heat sinks poking through that shroud. There’s lots of ventilation, but the cover does hide a lot of the ugly stuff, keeping it looking smart.

I love the little EVGA “E” on the power delivery hardware. Fortunately, it’s as much go as it is show, and should allow us to hit our review target of 5 GHz without it breaking a sweat.

The motherboard is powered via an 8-pin connector, nothing crazy, but well within the requirements for a mid-to-high-end motherboard like this.

The rear I/O looks competent, with seven USB ports, plus an additional Type-C connector. All the usual audio and LAN ports are there, as well as two handy display outputs should you need them. Finally, a master reset button could get you out of a bind if you muck up your OC settings too.

Connectivity

With four DIMM slots offering support for fast DDR4 memory, you’ll be well covered. I love that they’re all armoured too, not only does it look great, but it helps improve the durability of the slots and the motherboard overall. The addition of onboard power controls, as well as a BIOS Debug LED, are also very welcome tools to have, especially while overclocking on a testbench.

There are six SATA ports, as well as two USB 3.0 headers, taking care of a lot of your connectivity problems. Of course, there are a few USB 2.0 headers too.

More Armour!

There are three full-size PCIe slots, as well as three 1x slots. What’s good to see is that two of the full-size ones are armoured, so they’ll have no issues handling a pair of massive modern GPUs.

Gives your storage a super-speed boost with not one, not two, but three M.2 slots. Of course, they have Optane support too.