Friday 28 August 2015

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

The pricing isn’t premium, but what about the performance?

That gamer ‘look’ and great performance, but without the usual premium pricing. That’s the proposition-going-on-salespitch for Asus’s new Z170 Pro Gaming. It’s the affordable option for performance freaks. Of course, you could also say this ain’t no Asus ROG or TUF board. It’s a poverty-spec item you’d only buy if you can’t afford something better. So which is it, Barry bargain or false economy?

For now, we can’t provide a complete answer. It’s early days for both the new Intel Z170 chipset and the snazzy Skylake processors that slot into it. So, it’ll take time to shake out exactly what you can expect from the platform as a whole, and motherboards and CPUs in particular.

What’s more, we haven’t had a chance to take Asus’s higher-end Z170 boards for a spin yet. That said, we do have an MSI Z170A Gaming M7 on hand to provide some higher-priced context. But before we deep dive into those performance comparatives, let’s take a closer look at the Pro Gaming board.

You certainly wouldn’t mistake it for a high-end board. Thin and shiny, the PCB is just a little too skanky. That said, the red-’n’-black styling cues do provide a whiff of gaming pizzazz. Because, ya know, red-’n’-black means gaming. Handily, the cooler for the PCH chip has “Pro Gaming” writ large across its torso.

If you’re obsessed with bandwidth, the other items you’ll pick out pronto start with the PCI Express port. Yup, just one, which is probably fine given you can’t actually buy a PCIe SSD. The standard seems to be stillborn. Instead, it’s the M.2 interface that’s become the default option for really fast storage. The Pro  Gaming does indeed serve up just the one M.2 slot, but few mobos do better than that. The good news is that the slot is the fully four lane PCIe 3.0 Monty, and also supports all available lengths of M.2 SSDs. Yay.

Then there’s the USB connectivity. First, you get a pair of USB 2.0 ports. Then there are a quartet of blue-tinged USB 3.0 sockets. The real fanciness involves the red USB 3.1 port and the puny little USB 3.1 Type-C socket below it, both courtesy of an ASMedia ASM1142 controller. This board has all your USB bases covered – even if you only get one each of the newbies.

Get a bit more forensic and you’ll pick out one or two further frills. There’s a 10-phase power supply for the CPU socket, which is welcome given the changes in overclocking setup for Skylake CPUs. Or perhaps you’ll spot that the SupremeFX audio circuitry is properly shielded to prevent all those annoying pops.

Actually, fire her up and what you’re presented with is the same slick UEFI BIOS interface that’s seen across all kinds of Asus boards of late. What you don’t get is frills like an LED debug read out, or hardware buttons for functions like power, reset and auto-overclocking.

Not a bad package then. But do you lose anything when it comes to performance? The evidence regarding overclocking suggests no. You could stamp all over a cigarette paper with boots and you’d still struggle to slip it between this and the other Z170s we’ve tested. Stock-clocked performance is another matter, with the Pro Gaming bringing up the rear. That’s despite using the latest BIOS update.

We suspect future updates will close the gap. But as things stand, the Pro Gaming’s performance report card is just a tiny bit untidy. JEREMY LAIRD

SPECIFICATIONS
Chipset Intel Z170
Socket LGA1151
Form factor ATX
Memory support DDR4
Storage 6x SATA, 1x M.2, 2x SATAExpress
USB 2x USB 2.0, 4x USB 3.0, 1x USB 3.1, 1x USB 3.1 Type-C