ASUS Z170-A (LGA 1151) Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

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Pricing

The ASUS Z170-A motherboard is currently in stock at OverclockersUK for the low price of £116.99.

Summary

Wow, just wow. The ASUS Z170-A is a great motherboard and don’t let the series put you off, when you consider that the Z170-A would be the lowest of that series. However, that is assuming that ASUS will be releasing the same models as the X99 range.

The Z170-A and Z170 in general, brought great things with it, such as DDR4 memory support which improves productivity massively and a huge number of PCIe lanes to allow for multiple PCI, PCIe and M.2 lanes. This board, for example, has three M.2 lanes which can all work in RAID; imagine having high capacity M.2 SSDs, you wouldn’t need any external drivers.

ASUS haven’t really bundled much additional software with this motherboard, but really it doesn’t need it. Ai Suite holds all of the possible and relevant applications that you would likely use. I really like this as it just means a much faster and streamlined experience with nothing bogging you down.

The board is very attractive. The brilliant white heatsink and IO cover are the most dominating features of the board itself and work extremely well with the black and dark grey features of the rest of the board. Around the CPU socket is some small white lines that denote the CPU links on the PCB and I think it works really well, although you won’t really be able to see it under a CPU cooler, or in a case for that matter. Maybe if the entire PCB was styled like this or maybe even the back, who knows.

Now onto the performance, what is there to say? Overall we knew the i7-6700K was going to be better than the previous i7-4770K, but worse than the i7-5820K; however, we didn’t know how much worse. That simply wasn’t the case, it is almost on par with the i7-5820K in most cases. The DDR4 is a great addition over DDR3 and hopefully with DDR4 coming into the mainstream market; we will see DDR4 prices drop even futher. One new feature that is worth noting is the new Intel I219V LAN chip; it is superior to the previous I218V, but it requires more power; maybe Intel realised what Qualcomm had already known with the CPU load.

 

Pros

• Excellent performance
• High quality audio
• Not weighted down with utilities
• White colour scheme is refreshing
• Great price

Cons

• None, but I219V LAN is rather power hungry compared to the previous version

“The ASUS Z170-A is a great step forward for new and old users alike. The addition of DDR4 has really livened up the performance and the i7-6700K brings extreme performance to enthusiasts. You don’t need to spend big bucks to get the big picture.”

Thank you to ASUS for providing this review sample.