Asus augments its Z170 chipset series with something affordable
Since I covered the Skylake processor and its associated platform, I’ve been hunting for a motherboard that delivers an optimal intersection of price and performance.
Cheap H110- or H170 motherboards are good, but they lack overclocking features and PCIe lanes, among other things. The answer is the Z170 chipset, but the price puts many people off, with a few designs being well over £300.
But the Asus Z170-A costs less than £120, uses the same chipset and has many of the more desirable high-end features. So is the Asus Z179-A a bargain or are you missing out in some subtle way with it?
First off, I want to point out a few things about the Z170-A that I don’t like, and there are a few minor wrinkles I need to highlight. The most obvious of these is the huge plastic shroud that covers the I/O area, there for a purpose this writer couldn’t rationalise. Luckily, two screws easily detach it, if it clashes with your case layout or system sensibilities.
There are also three PCIe x16 slots, when there aren’t enough PCIe lanes to drive them at any more than 8x/8x/4x. And that assumes that no other lanes are used on the other slots or in storage. Those who want a triple-GPU arrangement still need the X99 over Z170, though this design is both SLI and CrosFireX compliant if you fancy dual GPU gaming.
Once you get past those minor points, this is a great design with a feature set that easily justifies the additional cost you’d incur over a H170 board, for example.
One of these critical features is an M.2 SSD slot, and the Z170-A has one that can be used either in PCIe mode or SATA. There are also four SATA 6Gbps ports, and this is the first design I’ve seen with a SATA Express port.
Initially, I’d thought Asus had been a bit frugal with USB 3.0 ports available, as there are just two in the I/O area, along with two USB 2.0 ports. Closer inspection revealed both a USB Type-C port and the new teal-coloured USB 3.1 10Gbps port.
Being beyond what Intel’s silicon offers, Asus added a new ASMedia USB 3.1 controller just for those two ports. The Z170 chipset supplies the rest, and there are dual front-panel headers for both USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 on board. That’s a whopping 14 USB ports, if you weren’t keeping count.
But where this design really shines is if you’ve got a ‘K’ class processor or some enhanced DDR4 memory modules. The Asus UEFI BIOS is knee-deep in tweaks to be made, and you should have no problem getting your processor to 4.7GHz or higher, and the memory modules to 3400MHz, if yours can go that quick.
Asus used a new ‘five-way’ optimisation model on the Z170-A that’s designed to get the most out of your memory and CPU, even if you don’t use an unlocked CPU.
This is by far the quickest Z170 board I’ve tested, and it easily locks horns with designs that cost double or more what this one does. The difference between this and a cheaper board is small, but it’s discernible.
What I could have done to enhance these numbers would have been to have used an M.2 drive instead of a conventional SSD, though that didn’t seem an entirely fair comparison.
If there is a caveat here, it’s that this board is really made to the constructional quality of a sub-£100 design, and there isn’t anything special about the build quality like you’d expect from the highend models.
The relevance of that aspect is entirely dependent on how long you keep your systems before moving on and if you’re expecting longterm reliability.
Overall, if you want a Z170 system that has most of the things you’re likely to need in the next few years, then there aren’t many rational arguments against the Asus Z170-A. Mark Pickavance
An affordable Z170 board with many of the trimmings.
Key Features
• 5-way optimization.
• A dedicated on-board water-pump header.
• Asus Pro Clock technology.
• Crystal Sound 3, Intel LAN and Turbo LAN.
• USB 3.1 on board.
• One Type-A port plus a reversible Type-C port.
• 5X Protection II: Advanced hardware safeguards.
• Four DDR4 slots up to 3400MHz (OC), 64GB maximum.
• M.2 and SATA Express.
• 3x PCIe x16 (8x8x4) and legacy PCI slot.
• DVI, VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort (three active at any time).