The Biostar X370GTN Mini-ITX Motherboard Review: AM4 Goes Tiny
by Gavin Bonshor on October 23, 2017 9:00 AM ESTGaming Performance
Ashes of the Singularity
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
Rise Of The Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013's Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.
One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 4 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
Thief
Thief has been a long-standing title in PC gamers hearts since the introduction of the very first iteration which was released back in 1998 (Thief: The Dark Project). Thief as it is simply known rebooted the long-standing series and renowned publisher Square Enix took over the task from where Eidos Interactive left off back in 2004. The game itself utilises the fluid Unreal Engine 3 engine and is known for optimised and improved destructible environments, large crowd simulation and soft body dynamics.
Total War: WARHAMMER
Not only is the Total War franchise one of the most popular real-time tactical strategy titles of all time, but Sega delve into multiple worlds such as the Roman Empire, Napoleonic era and even Attila the Hun, but more recently they nosedived into the world of Games Workshop via the WARHAMMER series. Developers Creative Assembly have used their latest RTS battle title with the much talked about DirectX 12 API so that this title can benefit from all the associated features that comes with it. The game itself is very CPU intensive and is capable of pushing any top end system to their limits.
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Brother Ali - Thursday, October 26, 2017 - link
I have the asrock itx B350 and a 1600. I have my voltage set to 1.375 in the bios. In HWMonitor its .384V-1.392V; stays at 1.392V consistently.austinsguitar - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
this sort of thing is why itx is bad for high wattage components. you cant expect much from this gigabyte board. the cooling on the vrm is awful. horindusly bad. these motherboards should not be overclocked too high for the long run. if you look up guides on the design of them they all miss the mark in components and cooling. so all in all. mini itx, dont do it on ryzen. atleast for overclocking long term. your problem is not new.xrror - Wednesday, October 25, 2017 - link
This is a Biostar board, not Gigabyte.Dr. Swag - Monday, October 23, 2017 - link
It would be great to see a better look into the vrms (efficiency, mosfet temps, etc.). AM4 VRMs seem to have been a hot topic (pun intended) since Ryzen launched due to boards with pretty budget vrms being able to run with 8 core CPUs. I would like a more in depth look into the vrms of each board to see how worthy all of them are.u.of.ipod - Monday, October 23, 2017 - link
Always happy to see small form factor reviews!!!Lurpak - Monday, October 23, 2017 - link
I have had this motherboard for since June and to be honest, I can not recommend it. If you are running an old version of the BIOS the motherboard is so unstable that it crashes all the time. My first unit died on me during a BIOS update (there's no backup BIOS), but luckily I was able to update the BIOS on the second one.Currently my problems are with memory where the motherboard sometimes fail to boot at XMP settings, which then requires me to set them again and hope that it works. My memory problems could be down to AGESA and seems to have been more stable since I got a BIOS update with AGESA 1.0.0.6b, but it still fails once in a while.
twnznz - Tuesday, October 24, 2017 - link
Does yours power cycle 5x when it fails a boot as well? I'm rolling AGESA 1.0.0.6b as well, Trident Z F4-3200C14D-16GTZR 14-14-14-34, with XMP settings. I've wound the mem voltage up to meet 1.35vLurpak - Tuesday, October 24, 2017 - link
Yeah, that is exactly what it does. The 5 times power cycle is a fail-safe designed to catch errors in BIOS settings. From what I have read the problem with the board seems to be, that it cannot get the correct voltage for the RAM and therefore fails boot. I am running G.Skill Ripjaws V, which runs at higher latencies.Paull29724 - Sunday, November 19, 2017 - link
I just got this motherboard, whats your system config?jrs77 - Monday, October 23, 2017 - link
mITX-boards are allways nice, but without an APU a mITX-board is pretty much useless for the majority of people, who would want to build a silent and powerefficient HTPC or SFF-office station with these.