NZXT surprised us at CES this year! We expect to see a new case, maybe some new RGB fans, but to our surprise NZXT showed us their first ever motherboard! Yes, NZXT is making motherboards now! We go hands on!
So to start off this is a Z370 motherboard, an obvious place to start for NZXT. The first thing you notice about this motherboard is that it has a full dust cover. We were surprised when we picked up the board and realized that the cover itself is metal and not plastic. Currently NZXT will be offering the board in two color variants, black and white. The entire piece can be completely removed from the board, pretty easily to as it is tool-less. There are also two sections of the cover that can be removed and NZXT will be offering different colors for these. The whole idea of the entire cover is to give a very clean look to your system, as you can see from the photo of the build below NZXT is able to accomplish that.
Moving on to specs the board has two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, two PCI-Express x4 slots, and a single PCI-Express x1 slot. This means you will have support for NVIDIA SLI as well as AMD CrossFire setups. Between those slots you’ll find two M.2 slots, both of which are PCI-Express 3.0 x4, so you know you are going to get the fastest speeds possible. There are also four SATA 6GB/s ports.
On the rear I/O of the board you have five USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, HDMI out, DisplayPort, audio connections, Gigabit Ethernet, and a BIOS reset button. There is also a USB 3.0 header by the SATA ports providing you with two more USB 3.0 ports.
One thing that is very cool about this motherboard is that NZXT has built in features of its Grid+ and Hue+ products as well as the adaptive noise reduction that is in their H700i case. You’ll find a total of nine fan headers on the board. Those as well as other headers are conveniently located on either the top or bottom of the board, out of the way of the dust cover. This means you’ll get full control of these fans in NZXT CAM software. On top of that there will be CPU overclocking built into CAM now and as an added bonus two RGB strips will ship with the board as well.
NZXT will be making this board available very soon as it will retail for $299.99.
