ASUS TUF H370-Pro Gaming Motherboard Review

This is a review of the ASUS TUF H-370-Pro Gaming (Wi-Fi) LGA1151 (300 Series) DDR4 DP HDMI DVI M.2 ATX Motherboard with Gigabit LAN and USB 3.1 Gen2.

Is it really as tough as advertised?

Time will tell because I bought one for my new Custom Computer Build, did I have problems with the build? A few however these were somewhat self induced, not have built or even worked on a newer computer system lack of knowledge will bite you every time... :(

I did my "due diligence" by researching the latest and greatest, noting a few things like M2 SSD, Gen2, and other neat tech jargon that I needed to come up to speed on.

One of the road blocks to the latest and greatest for me was money, this web site has not produced any income in eight years and the money left over from the good years has been depleted. So when my Wife offered a solution I took it. (Being retired is good in most ways, however living on a fixed income and when one of the income streams stop well for a DIYer it does present obstacles.)

Back to the review...

There were four or five possibilities for the motherboard in my price range that I wanted for my new computer, two from Intel, one Gigabit, two from ASUS. The Intel motherboards were with in the price range however were lacking some of the "needed" benefits such as more than 16 GB of ram (only two slots for memory), the fastest memory was 1600 GHz DDR3 . The Gigabit motherboard was an ok motherboard with all the benefits except one: no up grade path from the i7 to the i9 series processor. One of the ASUS motherboards also did not have the up grade path from i7 to i9.

So I picked the ASUS H-370 for the following reasons:

ASUS TUF H-370-Pro Gaming Specifications:

A. The CPU, this motherboard has an Intel LGA 1151 socket and will support 8th Generation processors, the other motherboards I looked at were 7th Generation, that is they will not support an i9 series processor, this board will... :)

After the fact there are some specifications that will bite me, specifically:

B. The Intel H370 chipset, this chipset does not support any Operating System before Windows 10, that is Windows 7 and 8 will install however the needed embedded devices will not work: USB Gen 1, 2, or 3, any network device, graphics, or audio. To use any of these devices you will need to add on those devices separately.

C. The M2, if you look at this specification you can use only SATA + PCIe 3.0x2 or only PCIe 3.0x4. The M2 device I bought was SATA only. This took some reading and understanding to figure out which M2 slot the device I have will be installed in.

D. The PCIex16 slots, there is only one slot for this type of device, my EVGA video card is a PCIe x16 only card, fortunately I have one other wise I would have to use the onboard video or buy one, and if that is the case no Windows 7 OS.

What I did not expect was the lack of support for older operating systems such as Windows 7, after trying to get the OS to accept the chipset I did some research on the Coffee Lake / Kaby Lake chipsets. Chipset drivers add the necessary information for embedded devices on the motherboard. When Microsoft announced the end of support for Windows 7 the hardware manufactures promptly stopped adding support to their hardware device software. Unlike with XP when support lasted another ten years or so. Anyone with older software that will not run on Windows 8, 8.1, or 10 will have to stay with Windows 7 until that software is updated. A lot of older still serviceable hardware will no longer work, I have one that specifically will not run on Windows 10: a NEAT scanner, the web site tells me that the drivers necessary to make the scanner work will not be available for any OS beyond Windows 7. Very short sighted of Intel in my opinion...

Other than a few irritations or missing drivers I have a fully operational H370 motherboard in my new Custom Computer Build with multi boot for Windows 7 and two Windows 10 installations. Life is good... :)