ASUS PRIME Z370-A Running Great On Linux

While ASUS lists the PRIME Z370-A as just being supported under "Windows 10 64-bit", to little surprise it's been running fine under recent Linux distributions as outlined in our various Coffee Lake tests over the past few weeks.

Of the 8th Gen Core / Coffee Lake Linux support in general, the main word of caution in general not specific to any motherboard is the UHD Graphics 630 not being supported out-of-the-box with current kernel releases. The Coffeelake support within the Intel DRM driver is currently considered "alpha" and is not enabled by default unless the system boots with the i915.alpha_support=1 parameter set. That will change with the Linux 4.15 kernel where Coffeelake/UHD Graphics are enabled unconditionally. When manually enabling the support though, I still have yet to encounter any issues on existing Linux 4.13~4.14 kernel releases. So as long as you are on a recent Linux distribution and are aware of the extra step to enable the support, you should be fine.

When speaking specifically about the ASUS PRIME Z370-A, it's been working out fine aside from one rather common Linux shortcoming... The onboard motherboard sensors are not currently exposed by the Linux kernel / LM_Sensors. Sadly that's the state with most newer motherboards, but most users anyhow aren't too concerned about the motherboard voltage/temperature/fan-speed sensors with at least the Coffeelake CPUs having working core temperature reporting via the Linux coretemp driver as the most important system vital.

Aside from the various articles making use of this motherboard linked to earlier in this article, additional tests of the PRIME Z370-A with Coffee Lake Core i3 / i5 / i7 CPUs can be found via our test results on OpenBenchmarking.org that were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite. From there you can easily look at a wealth of information as well as carrying out your own automated side-by-side comparisons.

Overall I am quite happy with the ASUS PRIME Z370-A and would recommend it for Linux desktop/gaming/enthusiast systems for the new Coffee Lake processors. ASUS provided the Z370-A kindly as a review sample while this board can be found from Internet retailers like Amazon and NewEgg for about $175 USD.