Best Motherboard for i7 10700k

The Gigabyte Z490 AORUS Xtreme motherboard is not, by any stretch of the imagination, cheap. In fact, it’s up to twice or even three times as pricey as any other board on our list. Little wonder then that it strolls off with the honors at the top of our table. To do anything less would be to add insult to financial injury.
That said, what you get for your dollars here is among the best motherboards Gigabyte knows how to make, two decades into the 21st century – which is saying a lot.

You can run the AORUS Xtreme up to 5000MHz on DDR4, assuming your i7 10700k can actually do that. If anything, the board seems over-qualified and over-spec’d, but it’s always better to have capacity and speed to spare than it is to find yourself gasping for the last licks of RAM or memory speed, right?

This being Gigabyte, the VRM game is always going to be top-notch, and the AORUS Xtreme, if anything, takes the company’s reputation for absurdly effective VRM strategies and builds, runs off with it, climbs a tree, and looks back, laughing.

We’re talking about 16-phase 90A power stages. Try to make this VRM sweat, we dare you. Finned heatsinks increase the cooling surface area a lot, and the VRM cooler also comes with a direct touch heat pipe and a thermal pad, to deliver efficient thermal transfer to the cooling pipe and the fins.

The four memory slots here are caught in a limbo of PCle peculiarity. They’re PCle 3.0, which is the current state of the art for data transfer. But they’re marked as ready for PCle 4.0 when Intel upgrades from the Comet Lake standard to the Rocket Lake standard. Rocket Lake chips will allegedly use PCle 4.0, but when they’ll hit the market is still as yet anyone’s guess.
The on board wifi is Intel wifi-6, of course, backed up by Bluetooth 5. The AORUS Xtreme also comes with a wired LAN (Intel 2.5Gb and Aquantia 10Gb).

A memory storage capacity of 10000 TB is as staggering as you’d need it to be to pay the asking price for the AORUS Xtreme, and the memory speed of 5000MHz is pretty much top of the leaderboard for i7 10700k-compatible motherboards.

Yes, you’ll pay extra for the AORUS Xtreme.
The thing you’ll marvel at is that it will be at least almost worth it.

The Gigabyte Z490 Vision G shares a lot of the attractive elements of the AORUS Xtreme, but costs a fraction of the price. You lose out on some of the coolest stuff for that price drop, it’s true – but whether you weep into your pizza at its loss is less certain.

Plenty of elements will be familiar – the 10000 TB of memory storage makes the step-down with no problem at all. There’s an important reduction in memory speed to 4400MHZ, but the degree to which that slows down your active gaming performance is probably less than the relief you get at not paying the AORUS price. Four memory slots are available for DDR4 RAM DIMM. And like the AORUS Xtreme, the Z490 Vision G comes with dual M.2 slots.

Being Gigabyte, you still get an insanely impressive VRM strategy – here, you have direct 12 phases digital VRM, with a 50A smart power stage. As with the AORUS Xtreme, you’d have to work ridiculously hard to get this VRM to freak out.

And you still get an advanced thermal design with a micro-block surface heatsink and a next-generation direct touch heatpipe. So far, so cool in every sense of the word.
The Z490 Vision G provides Intel HD graphics support through an HDMI port. The 2.5 G LAN makes the transfer to the much cheaper board too, so you do begin to wonder what exactly you’re paying for in the more expensive model. The answer tends towards ease – the AORUS Xtreme has the power and the capacity to stroll on by most everything in its class. But the much less expensive Z490 Vision G makes enough of a case on its own merits to stand as one of the best motherboards for the i7 10700k CPU, before we harp too much on the colossal price difference.

Sorry, did we think that, or did we say it?

The MSI Mag Z490 Tomahawk takes us a little away from the heavyweight mentality of Gigabyte, and gives us a motherboard option that foregrounds other things besides the joyful, practical, but nevertheless slightly absurd quality of its VRM.

One of the things you notice immediately about the Tomahawk board is that it brings a maximum memory of 128GB to the party, with 4 memory slots for DDR4 RAM. What’s more, it restricts the maximum RAM capacity to just 64GB, which is worth remembering in any side-by-side bench testing you do.

Twin-turbo M.2, with M.2 Shield Frozr gives impressive data transfer speeds of up to 32 GB/s so your ultra-fast SSDs can react in rapid time. And the board also carries a 2.5G LAN plus Gigabit LAN.

Heatsink? Pretty impressive – there’s a finned sink here, though unlike the Gigabyte versions, there’s no direct touch heat pipe. A thermal conductivity rating of 7W/mK should be enough to keep your board cool under heavy load though.

The Tomahawk comes with 4 PCle slots, though as with other Intel-compatible motherboards, they are as yet PCle 3.0.

The temptation with the Tomahawk is to see it as an also-ran, compared to the two more market-dominating Gigabyte boards. Really though, when linked to an i7 10700k CPU, the Tomahawk will give you excellent gaming, rapid connection and data exchange, and more than a reasonable heatsink game. That’s got to make it worth recommending among the best motherboards for the i7 10700k.

We offered you a motherboard option for every kind of builder. The Asus ROG Strix Z490-G is a micro-ATX board for your non-tower options.
Maintaining the maximum RAM size from the MSI Mag, you can get 128GB of memory here from 4 slots for DDR4 RAM. It also brings a more-than-reasonable maximum memory speed of 4600MHz to your micro-ATX build.

The board helps you get the most out of your build, up-rating its power delivery and bringing a sophisticated cooling system to your game. A combination of the advanced cooling system (configurable through Fan Xpert 4) and intelligent controls lets you get into overclocking on the smaller system.
Onboard WiFi-6 (802.11ax) supports ultrafast wireless-networking speeds. And because you’ll be gaming a lot with this motherboard, there’s an industry-leading audio package, delivered through the SupremeFX S1220A codec, DTS Sound Unbound, and Sonic Studio III.

In terms of a VRM and power control, the Strix uses 12+2 power stages with the ProCool II power connector to maintain power reliability even under heavy load. And that advanced cooling system? You’re looking at an optimized thermal design: VRM heatsink, PCH fanless heatsink, M.2 heatsink, hybrid fan headers, and that Fan Xpert 4 ease of control.
If the Strix proves anything, it’s that you don’t need to have a full-sized ATX form factor motherboard to bring lots of the good stuff to your gaming build. If you have a hankering to go micro-ATX, you could do a lot worse than going with the Asus ROG Strix Z490-G as your motherboard, linked to your i7 10700k CPU.

And if you’re going right down the spectrum into the smallest builds, you’re going to need a tiny mini-ITX motherboard that still packs enough punch to justify pairing it with an i7 10700kCPU. That’s what the MSI Meg is all about.
Still bringing dual-channel DDR4 RAM to your build, the compromises of the size are inescapable – only 2 memory slots for your money, and a correspondingly smaller maximum memory storage count.

On the other hand, perhaps oddly in a range that has hung back on implementing PCle 4.0 technology for rapid data transfer, the size component here makes PCle 4.0 a useful way of delivering speedy data-transfer without throwing the whole thing out of joint.

Likewise, the nature of the mini-ITX board means it crams a lot into a restricted space – its aluminum cover includes an extended heatsink. Adding a 2.5G gaming LAN and the latest wifi-6 to the package lets the Meg Z490I offer a fully modern gaming experience within the confines of a mini-ITX board.