Board Layout

Pulling the board out of its bag reveals a matte black PCB and black heatsinks, a handsome aesthetic that should match up well with most builds. The branding is pretty minimal, with "Z370 Lightsaber" in white just under the first PCI slot and a white dragon to the right of that. The placement of these two means both are covered up once the graphics card is installed. The "Leet" logo on the heatsink is removable, should you feel it doesn't fit your theme. The ECS Z370-Lightsaber is a good-looking board, but those looks really suffer since there are uncovered silver bits on the rear I/O. A black shield over that area would make for a welcome enhancement.


The socket is open and uncluttered, and cooler clearance shouldn't be an issue. The four DIMM slots sit to the right, and the first M.2 slot is just beneath those.


The second M.2 slot is between the second and third PCI x16 slots.


The ECS Z370-Lightsaber has three PCIe x16 slots and three PCIe x1 ports. There are six standard SATA 6 Gb/s plugs on the board's right edge, angled at 90 degrees. Two of these slots are controlled by an ASMedia ASM 1061 chip, while the other four are handled by the Z370 chipset. Two fan headers and no less than four RGB LED headers are joined by the usual front panel and USB and audio headers along the bottom of the board.


The rear I/O on the ECS Z370-Lightsaber is reasonably well populated; four USB 3.0 ports in blue with two 3.1 ports in teal, all type-A. The omission of a type-C port is pretty baffling. There are four USB 2.0 ports, two yellow ports by the PS/2 and two red ports by the Ethernet port. According to the manual, the yellow ports are only for the keyboard and mouse, and the red ports are only for a "rezound vigor USB 2.0 device". I don't know what that is, but a quick test with HDTune Pro shows that these ports function like any other USB 2.0 port would. For display, there is an HDMI and a DisplayPort, but no DVI. An optical SPDIF out port and clear CMOS button are both present and welcome inclusions. The six audio jacks are not color-coded, which is an odd and annoying choice considering how colorful the various USB ports are.