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Software & Firmware

Asus has done an excellent job of developing and promoting its Aura lighting-control software, which is compatible with various third-party devices (such as RGB DRAM lighting), in addition to the Strix Z370-E Gaming’s single light bar, RGB LED headers, and Addressable LED header.

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There’s lots of branding going on in AI Suite 3, and TPU runs its 5-Way Optimization program for automatic overclocking, fan tuning, and idle voltage tuning for improved efficiency. In our anecdotal testing, it picked a 1.35V core for our CPU to allow it to operate at 4.8GHz, with a -3x multiplier for AVX loads. It scaled down to 4x when fully loaded due to thermal throttling, before suddenly rebooting eight minutes into our Prime95 test.

The Strix Z370-E Gaming firmware opens to an EZ Mode interface, which includes the ability to enable XMP mode, set boot order, select fan profiles, and run its EZ System Tuning utility. We ran that utility, selecting “Gaming/Media Editing” as our primary task and “Liquid Cooling” as our cooling format, and were rewarded with a 5.15GHz overclock at 1.45V. Prime95 crashed our fourth CPU core instantly, however. Retrying it with “Tower” cooling selected, the program chose 1.425V CPU core at 5.05GHz, whereupon Prime95 crashed core 4. Our third try, choosing “Boxed” cooler, set a 4.95GHz clock at 1.40V and likewise saw Prime95 crashing core 4 instantly.

Pressing the keyboard’s F7 key switches the firmware GUI to Advanced Mode, where manual settings are only a few clicks away. Our CPU reached 4747MHz at 1.30V core, a bit shy of its previously attained 4848MHz limit. Dropping back to a 100MHz BCLK, we found the board capable of supporting our DDR4-3866 memory at DDR4-4000. Note that the DRAM is set to 1.3266V, since our voltmeter showed that the board has a +25mV offset at the DIMM slots (which the board only reports as an approximate 17mV offset).

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We said on page 1 that the front PCIe 3.1 Gen2 output can be enabled by disabling the two PCIe x1 slots directly beneath the two main graphics card slots, and that SATA ports 5 and 6 can be enabled by reducing the second M.2 slot to four lanes. This is indeed the default configuration. If you want those two x1 slots, or you’d like to give up two SATA ports to boost bandwidth to the second M.2 slot, you can do it from the Advanced/Onboard Devices Configuration menu. Having said that, the entire chipset is fed by only four lanes, and the upper M.2 slot is x4 by default.