This board isn’t all about flash, though. It should stand out in any windowed case. Although I quite liked Gigabyte’s simple and clean design language in the Z270 generation, this look is distinctive without evoking medieval torture devices or occult rituals. Instead of the plain white and black shrouding that we saw on the company’s Z270 boards, the Z370 Gaming 7 has a sort of mecha- or cyberpunk-inspired style that manifests as elaborate metal and metal-look accents all over the I/O shroud and heatsinks. The $250 Gaming 7 is the most extreme exponent of Gigabyte’s Z370 styling trends. Gigabyte has been constantly refining its Aorus boards since the introduction of the brand with the Z270X-Gaming 5 and friends in January, and the Z370 Gaming 7 gets all of the latest improvements from that continued effort up until now. What’s a mobo manufacturer to do to set itself apart when the primary changes are in a standard component that everybody has to implement? In the case of Gigabyte’s Z370 Aorus Gaming 7, its highest-end Z370 board so far, the answer is a healthy dose of fresh styling cues and new construction techniques borrowed from the company’s latest Intel X299 and AMD X399 motherboards. Z370 motherboards are all about Coffee Lake support, for better or for worse, and motherboard makers aren’t being given the most revolutionary canvas to work with to mark the advent of a new platform generation. Z370 itself is, as far as I can tell, a warming-over of the Z270 platform controller hub-they even share the same Intel product specification manual.

Yes, the revised LGA 1151 socket on these boards offers better power delivery to six-core CPUs in what used to be the domain of four-core parts, but that’s not strictly a chipset feature. As generational leaps in motherboards go, the shift from Z270 to Z370 will not go down as a major one.

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