If you’re on a tight budget, opting for a Skylake Z170 system is thankfully becoming more affordable all the time. There are now plenty of motherboards below the £100 mark, such as this Z170-Gaming K3 from Gigabyte, which can push most CPUs to their air-cooled limits, so any extra cash will only net you some more features and sometimes a little extra performance.
However, there are only a few notable features omitted from the Z170-Gaming K3. You get two USB 3.1 Type-A ports, although there’s no reversible Type-C port. There’s also an M.2 port, which supports 4x PCI-E 3 NVMe SSDs such as Samsung’s 950 Pro, plus there are two SATA Express ports, sharing the full complement of six SATA 6Gbps ports controlled by the Intel chipset. The board also sports isolated audio circuitry and Chemicon capacitors, with a claimed 115dB signal-to-noise ratio and 104dB recording quality. The top 16x PCI-E slot is reinforced with a steel shield too.
That’s a solid set of specifications for a board costing under £100, although there are some omissions too. While two-way CrossFire is supported, there’s no support for SLI and the second 16 x PCI-E slot can only run in 4x mode, which isn’t ideal if you’re using two high-end GPUs.
There are also no on-board overclocking features – it lacks on-board power and reset buttons, a clear-CMOS switch and there’s no LED-POST code display either. Comparatively, the ASRock Extreme4 still has all these features.
Thankfully, other aspects of the Z170-Gaming K3 are up to scratch. The layout is generally good and the M.2 port and top 1x PCI-E slots are well placed separately above the top 16x slot, so should always be accessible whatever other expansion cards you use. That said, the M.2 port is so close to the CPU socket that large CPU coolers may well obstruct access to it.
The two 16x slots are also doublespaced so if you decide to opt for a twoway GPU setup, proximity of the cards and airflow room shouldn’t be issues.
Aesthetically, the Z170-Gaming K3 is very appealing too. It sports snazzy red details and a dark brown – not black – PCB, which doesn’t come across clearly in photos. Gigabyte has also gone to town with some lighting too. It isn’t fully customisable RGB lighting, but there are some powerful red LEDs illuminating the audio circuitry, and what we can only describe as go-faster stripes on the opposite side of the PCB. These lights can also be tied into effects that are configurable in the EFI, such as pulsing or beating in response to music playback.
Stock-speed results from the Z170-Gaming K3 were a little low, with a total system score of 126,333 in our RealBench 2015 test suite, compared to 135,694 from the ASRock Z170 Extreme4. There wasn’t a big performance deficit in our Total War game test, though, and power consumption was very frugal too. We couldn’t find a reason for the latter – setting the XMP profile had all of our test kit’s components working correctly – it looks as though Gigabyte has really nailed power efficiency.
The Gigabyte excelled in our audio tests though. Noise and dynamic range results of -103.9dBA and 103.8dBA respectively are excellent for such a cheap motherboard, being much better than those of the MSI Z170A SLI Plus, which languished in the mid-nineties for both results. Even the best boards we’ve tested only manage one or two dBA higher, so there’s little need to get a separate sound card with this board unless you need additional features or are gunning for maximum audio quality.
The Z170-Gaming K3 was on the ball in the storage tests too, matching the read and write speeds we’ve seen so far on other boards in our SATA 6GBps CrystalDiskMark test, with results of 561MB/sec and 524MB/sec respectively. Meanwhile, our 256GB Samsung 950 Pro hit 2,293MB/sec and 959MB/sec read and write speeds from the M.2 port.
Overclocking the Z170-Gaming K3 was simple, although the EFI is a little clunky and outdated. Our overclock to 4.8GHz just required a vcore of 1.4V and the multiplier to be set to 48x, so it’s clear the board won’t shy away from some decent returns in this respect if you have a decent cooler – we used a Corsair H80i GT for our tests. Thankfully, this overclock also restored some balance to the benchmarks. The overall score rose to 147,100 – enough to match the MSI Gaming Pro Carbon, and the Gigabyte bettered the ASRock Z170 Extreme4 in the video encoding test too. This overclock did result in the load power consumption rising to 197W, though, which is one of the highest results we’ve seen, albeit only by 10-15W.
The Z170-Gaming K3’s stock speed results are a little disappointing, but once it’s overclocked, it’s on a par with even much more expensive boards. It’s easy to overclock too, managing to hit 4.8GHz, which is the highest frequency we’ve seen from the majority of Z170 boards we’ve tested.
Audio performance is excellent too, and it kept up with the best motherboards in terms of storage results. Combined with a good layout, all you’re missing are some overclocking tools and SLI support, but those key omissions are the Gigabyte’s main problem. For just £14 more, ASRock’s Z170 Extreme4 is just as good at overclocking, has similar audio and storage performance, but also has the full complement of overclocking tools, a USB 3.1 Type-C port, a superior EFI and SLI support. Unless you’re on a very tight budget, that extra cash is ultimately worth paying. ANTONY LEATHER
VERDICT
A decent budget motherboard for the money, although the competition outdoes it in a number of areas for just a little extra cash.
SPECIFICATIONS
Chipset Intel Z170
CPU socket Intel LGA1151
Memory support 4 slots: max 64GB DDR3 (up to 3600MHz)
Expansion slots Two 16x PCI-E 3, four 1x PCI-E 3
Sound Realtek ALC1150
Networking Killer E2201 Gigabit LAN
Overclocking Base clock 98–341MHz, CPU multiplier 8-80x; max voltages, CPU 1.8V, RAM 2V
Ports 6 x SATA 6Gbps (Z170), 1 x M.2, 2 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 4 x USB 3, 1 x LAN, 8-channel surround audio out, line in, mic, 1 x HDMI 1.4, 1 x DVI-D, 1 x PS2
Dimensions (mm) 305 x 244