Conclusion
Asus knows how to make a decent board, of course, and uses the Z370 iteration as a loose blueprint for the £115 ROG Strix B360.Intel is finally adding in a number of chipsets to support the latest desktop 8th Gen Core processors. Now with lower-cost options available, most notably B360, the chip giant is looking to meet the value proposition offered by AMD head on.
The B360 is a cut-down version of Z370, and its remit is to offer the same performance at stock speeds. It does so, according to our benchmarks, so what's the catch? Well, expansion opportunities are more limited and overclocking goes by the wayside. That's not great news to the true enthusiasts but makes a lot of sense for the guy or gal who wants a fit-and-forget DIY PC.
Asus knows how to make a decent board, of course, and uses the Z370 iteration as a loose blueprint for the £115 ROG Strix B360-F Gaming. It looks good; the new styling works well, and it's nice to see that solid audio, that excellent back panel and heatsink-cooled primary M.2 slot make the cut.
Bottom line: the Intel B360 chipset has been a long time in coming. More suitable for budget builds that eschew overclocking and massive PCIe storage, Asus, as expected, does a fine job for its interpretation.
Good looks
Better value than equivalent Z370
Z370-like performance
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The Asus ROG Strix B360-F Gaming is available from Scan Computers*
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At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
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HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments
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LMAO,£115 for a motherboard which is stuck running 2666MHZ DDR4 at best?? I expect reviews in general to quietly forget that.Xlucine
£115 for a non-overclocking motherboard is good value now? That's going up against A320, and those boards come in at half the price
CAT-THE-FIFTH
LMAO,£115 for a motherboard which is stuck running 2666MHZ DDR4 at best?? I expect reviews in general to quietly forget that.
It seems to work with XMP profiles, maybeWe have deliberately let the Z370 overclock the Core i3-8350K chip, raising the all-core speed from 4.0GHz to 5.0GHz.
B360, which doesn't have this feature and is therefore represented at stock CPU speed, also doesn't allow you to overclock the memory, so 3,600MHz it is on our fastest memory set.
I say maybe because the RAM used is a 3.2 GHz set (“G.Skill 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-3,200”), so I dunno how hexus ran it at 3.6 GHz without overclocking it. The K chip used shouldn't affect this, since it's only rated for 2.4 GHz RAM at stock speeds
ETA: unless hexus used different RAM, that would explain itXlucine
It seems to work with XMP profiles, maybe
I say maybe because the RAM used is a 3.2 GHz set (“G.Skill 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-3,200”), so I dunno how hexus ran it at 3.6 GHz without overclocking it. The K chip used shouldn't affect this, since it's only rated for 2.4 GHz RAM at stock speeds
ETA: unless hexus used different RAM, that would explain it
Good question. Methodology states;Memory G.Skill 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-3,200
Memory Speed DDR4-2400
Yet overclocking tests state;B360, which doesn't have this feature and is therefore represented at stock CPU speed, also doesn't allow you to overclock the memory, so 3,600MHz it is on our fastest memory set.
I'm guessing that the memory was swapped out for a different set, even with XMP profiles if they were available wouldn't take the RAM up to 3,600MHz, only to 3,200MHz based on the set shown in the methodology.
