Introduction

2017 was a huge year for motherboard manufacturers, with no less than four new platform launches in a little over twelve months. Coffee Lake's launch may not have been the most surprising of those, but it has proven to be an exciting one. ECS has put fourth some interesting boards over the past few generations, products with provocative names like "Claymore" and, of course, "Lightsaber". ECS is looking to start 2018 off right with the newest addition to that Lightsaber brand, the ECS Z370-Lightsaber.

The ECS Z370-Lightsaber takes the stage with promising features, like a 14 phase power design, dual BIOS, Intel Optane support, and a plethora of other overclocker friendly features. ECS has produced solid hardware in the past, offering durable, well-designed motherboards. The company's BIOS and software offerings haven't always matched up, however. The last few generations of Intel CPUs have been very forgiving in that regard, requiring very few options and very little BIOS optimization to achieve a respectable overclock. Users could expect to see meaningful overclocking by just changing the core multiplier and upping the vCore.

Coffee Lake should be the same since the unlocked K chips only need an increased multiplier and core voltage. However, the addition of two extra cores on this newest generation makes Coffee Lake a little more power-hungry when it comes to overclocking. Simply porting a BIOS over from Z270 without any back-end support for the increased power draw could lead to an overclocked CPU throttling regardless of the user's settings. So, has ECS done their homework and delivered a motherboard package capable of living up to its "Lightsaber" branding?

Specifications