NZXT Announces Its First Motherboard – The N7 Z370

NZXT makes everything around a computer. It has a diverse range of chassis designs, fans, liquid coolers, even smart fan controllers – they’ve even got power supplies. What was completely unexpected was treading into new territory, not with peripherals like keyboards and mice, but with a motherboard.

Specifics around the board are somewhat limited at this time, apart from a general overview of what’s on offer. It’s called the N7 and it will be built around Intel’s Z370 chipset. NZXT’s approach to the board is more centered around cooling and aesthetics. From what we are aware, it’s an OEM design built by ECS (although unconfirmed), but with NZXT’s input around certain features.

Being Z370, it supports the latest Coffee Lake CPUs from Intel, and Optane Memory. It has two M.2 connectors, support for multi-GPU, and supports memory up to 3866MHz. It’s gone with a 15-phase VRM by Infineon, although we’re not sure how it’s split between CPU and memory.

The most noticeable part of the N7 is the shroud, or complete cover that warps around the board. It’s very similar to that offered by ASUS with its Sabertooth range of boards. It’s a metal faceplate that comes in two colors, the safe suspects of white and black, meaning it’ll go with pretty much any color scheme. Additional plates are available in blue, red and purple.

The next part that sets the N7 apart is to do with the fan headers and RGB lighting control. From what can be seen, there are none fan headers dotted around the board, so the board is built around not just fan control, but also monitoring, such as with pumps. There are RGB headers as well, but we don’t have much info on those at this time.

Tying it all together is likely the main reason NZXT built the board in the first place, and that’s the CAM integration across the map. One of the irritating problems about RGB lighting is the non-standard implementation of it from various companies. Motherboards often play a central role in coordinating the different lighting effects, from the various lights dotted around the board, the RGB strips that are plugged in, even the memory. Companies like Corsair also have peripherals to coordinate too. Getting all of those devices talking to each other is a real pain.

NZXT would like to use its CAM software to act as a central hub for basically everything about the PC. It already has its own way of dealing with fan speeds and lighting effects through its hubs, but it seems to want to take things further with motherboard lighting and overclocking as well. CAM can already build cooling profiles, and even overclock the GPU, but overclocking the CPU and wrapping everything up into a single package means either coordinating with motherboard vendors to gain access to those functions, or, build your own motherboard – which appears what NZXT has done. NZXT has made mention that this is not really an overclocking board, but we do wonder how it plans to develop CAM in the future.

The N7-Z370 will be made around the end of the month for about $300.