Ahead of their launch, motherboards based on Intel’s cheaper H370 Express and H310 Express chipsets, hit the shelves in brick-and-mortar PC hardware stores in Thailand. Numerous pictures of ASRock-branded H370 and H310 motherboard models, namely the H370 Pro4, and the H310-HDV; GIGABYTE-branded Aorus H370 Gaming 3, and ASUS Prime H370-A, were posted to social media by PC buyers. Between March-April, Intel plans to launch cheaper H370 Express, B360 Express, and H310 Express chipsets, alongside newer Core i3 and Core i5 “Coffee Lake” quad-core and six-core SKUs; besides Pentium Gold and Celeron dual-core chips based on the silicon.
The cheaper motherboards are expected to bring down the overall platform costs of 8th generation Core processors, which now require you to front over $100 on motherboards based on the expensive Z370 chipset. As with several generations of Intel chipset before it, cheaper chipsets lose out on key features such as CPU overclocking and NVIDIA SLI support.