Overclocking

Gigabyte's Z370 boards have been a little trickier to overclock than the rest of the field, but only because we've found we need to apply some loadline calibration to get stable at vcores below 1.3V with our Core i7-8700K.

As per usual, we needed to apply the Turbo loadline setting along with a vcore of 1.28V to get stability at 5GHz, and while the VRM heatsink certainly got toasty, we saw no ill-effects after several hours of benchmarking, albeit with some CPU temperatures hitting the high 80s.

To see an in-depth look at Gigabyte's latest EFI and software head here.

Performance Analysis

The Z370N-WiFi returned some solid numbers across all our benchmarks, although as it was running at the same clock speeds at stock and overclocked, there were very little differences or stand-out results. Despite being sandwiched between the graphics card, DIMM slots and CPU, the M.2 heatsink proved to be fairly useful too, reducing the M.2 temperature of our Samsung 960 Evo from 75°C to 59°C. 

It also recorded the fastest M.2 write speed of 1,848MB/sec, which is nearly 100MB/sec faster than the heatsink-less Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Ultra Gaming. The audio performance was a match for any other board on test too and typical of the Realtek ALC1220 audio codec.

Conclusion

The one downside to the Z370N-WiFi is that it lacks any physical overclocking and testing tools, but then so does Asus' £190 ROG Strix Z370-I Gaming, while MSI's Z370I Gaming Pro Carbon AC only offers a CMOS clear button in this regard. As a result, the fact it's a big step up from its predecessor, has an excellent layout, effective M.2 cooling, and overclocks as well as the ATX Z370 boards we've tested means that Gigabyte has nailed things here. The only thing we'd change is the ability of the rear M.2 port to support cheaper SATA-based M.2 SSDs. Otherwise it's a superb mini-ITX motherboard that's just at home on its own as it is paired with a graphics card in a gaming system.