Boards from Gigabyte’s Gaming range now sport a predominantly red and white colour scheme, giving the Z170X-Gaming 7 a great racy look, with a huge white plastic shroud covering much of the left side of the PCB. Hidden under this shroud you’ll also find a multi-colour lighting system that’s configurable in the EFI. There are PCI-E slot metal shrouds too, which also look fantastic, and Gigabyte has included silver SATA cables too – whether you like these touches depends on your taste, though, and some folks may find them a little garish.
In terms of features, the Gigabyte is similar to the Asus, except the Z170X-Gaming 7 offers two M.2 and SATA Express connectors. Otherwise, both boards have three 16x PCI-E slots and three 1x PCI-E slots, along with the full complement of overclocking and testing tools that are missing on the MSI board. The Gaming 7 includes two LAN ports as well, made by Intel and Qualcomm respectively. Both Type-A and Type-C USB 3.1 ports are included as well, with dual USB 3 and USB 2 headers on the PCB.
Both boards also offer uprated audio circuitry, with Gigabyte opting for a Creative system. The Gigabyte board also offers eight SATA 6Gbps ports in total, although two of them are provided by an ASMedia controller and should be avoided with modern SATA 6Gbps SSDs, as they’re much slower than their Intel-based equivalents.
Meanwhile, layout is generally excellent, although the top M.2 slot will likely be obscured by large CPU coolers while the lower will suffer the same issue with dual-slot graphics cards. The Hero, on the other hand, has its lone M.2 port located beneath the second 16x PCI-E slot for easier access, at least with single-GPU setups, plus it can handle up to 110mm SSDs, while the Gaming 7’s slots are limited to 80mm cards.
Sadly, though, the Gaming 7 lagged behind the MSI Z170A Gaming M5 in last place in our performance results, despite enabling the XMP profile in the EFI, although the Gaming 7 did also have the lowest power draw on test. The audio performance was good using our standard settings, with similar performance to that of the MSI board, although it wasn’t quite as good as the Asus Hero board.
Meanwhile, overclocking was easy thanks to the inclusion of loadline calibration adjustment, which our Core i7-6700K sample loves, and 4.8GHz was an easy target. The EFI could do with some work in terms of ease of use though, compared with both MSI and Asus’ offerings. Also, the extra 100MHz in clock speed over the overclocked MSI board still wasn’t enough to beat it in our performance tests.
Sadly, we couldn’t quite hit 4.9GHz, as temperatures hit a wall before we could apply enough voltage to make it stable. This still wasn’t enough to topple the MSI in every test though, despite an advantage in clock speed.
The Z170X-Gaming 7 is a solid and feature-packed motherboard. It looks great and trumps the MSI board in a number of areas, including overclocking, but you’ll need to spend some time tweaking the settings as the default XMP profile and EFI defaults didn’t yield competitive performance, especially at stock speed.
However, the Asus Maximus VII Hero only costs a small amount more than this Gigabyte board, and is superior in a number of areas, even if it doesn’t have the Gigabyte’s two M.2 connectors.