ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming (LGA 1151) Motherboard Review

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging Today is the day that the Z170 chipset and Skylake overclocking processors are here and we can finally show off these great products. The Z170 platform has taken a somewhat minor upgrade to the untrained eye, but to those who know what to look for will notice many subtle changes. Probably the most notable is the addition of DDR4 memory and obviously the socket change to 1151 over 1150. Beyond that, you also have very subtle connectivity upgrades such as the possibility of up to 10 USB 3.0 ports, USB 3.1 Type A and Type C as standard and up to 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes; yes 20! What this means to the end user is the possibility of having multiple M.2 ports being featured onto a single motherboard and much more. ASUS are currently one of the largest motherboard companies in the world, just outselling the closest competitor by a few hundred thousand units. With motherboards ranging from the budget pleasers all of the way up to the renowned Republic of Gamers variants; there is a bit of ASUS for everyone. This includes the brand new Pro Gaming motherboard that we're looking at today. Something that ASUS has done with the Pro Gaming motherboard is to take key features from the RoG series and incorporate them onto a motherboard at a reduced price. One of the key features is the RoG Extension header, which enables the ability to utilise the RoG Front base; a dual bay monitoring and overclocking piece of hardware. With RoG features at a cut price, would the performance be lower or are we looking at another GTX 980Ti vs Titan X scenario? Let's take a look at the benchmarks and put all of the puzzle pieces together. Key Features Manufacturers nowadays need to find innovative ways to stand out from the crowd, ASUS is no exception and has crammed a huge array of features into this motherboard. Gamer's Guardian II DIGI+ VRM DRAM Overcurrent Protection ESD Guards On VGA, LAN, Audio, KBMS and USB 3.0/ 2.0 Highly Durable Components Dual Intelligent Processors 5 5 Way Optimisation: TPU EPU DIGI+ VRM Fan Xpert 3 Turbo App RAMCache Media Streamer EZ DIY Push Notice UEFI BIOS EZ Mode O.C. Tuner CrashFree BIOS 3 EZ Flash 3 Q-Design Q-Shield Q-DIMM Q-LED Q-Slot AI Suite 3 Disk Unlocker AI Charger+ ASUS CPU-Z Packaging and Accessories As the Pro Gaming motherboard series is new to Z170, the box styling had to recreated. The feature image is a snippet of the World of Warships game which has a premium account bundled with this motherboard. The styling is very ROG-esq thanks to the ROG heritage and features incorporated within this motherboard. The back of the box has a small diagram of the board and the key features in detail. Inside the box is a conservative amount of accessories, driver disk, manual, and cable labels Along with those are 4x SATA 6Gb/s cables, SLI bridge, I/O shield and an additional M.2 screw and riser. ASUS has designed a great solution for the Z170 range. This new CPU holder enables the user to handle the CPU as minimal as possible. This holder aids the prevention of bent pins and can be left on when the socket latch is secured. Insert the CPU by whatever your usual handling means; I found it easiest to push the CPU by the centre until it latched. Simply place it onto the CPU socket, there is only one way you can do this. And finally close the socket. You may hear some slight creaking of plastic, that is to be expected on some installations. A Closer Look & Layout Analysis Looking at the motherboard in general and it's relatively plain. Small MOSFET heat sinks add a small splash of colour and style to the upper half of the board. There is a fair amount of space around the CPU socket, perfect for fitting those fiddly cooling solutions. Taking a look at the CPU socket itself. It resembles the sockets of previous years thanks to a great pin design. This motherboard can accept cooling solutions from the 1150 range of motherboards. The chipset heatsink is very stylish. ASUS really want to drive home to 'Pro Gaming' brand name. Looking at the I/O options. The layout is conventional and features the following: 1x PS/2 port, 2x USB 2.0, 1x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI port, 1x VGA, 1x DVI, 4x USB 3.0, 1x Gigabit LAN, 2x USB 3.1 (1x Type A, 1x Type C), 1x S/PDIF out and 5 HD audio jacks. Moving down the side of the board, we can see the yellow opaque line running the length of the SupremeFX amplifier. This signifies the different right and left sound layers. The SupremeFX Amp is covered in a similar casing to that of the previous ASUS RoG motherboards. ASUS is trying to cram as much as possible onto this motherboard. 3x PCIe x1 lanes and 2x PCIe x16 lanes dominate the add-on card section. Placed just below the chipset heatsink is the M.2 port. With some smart designing, the port can accommodate 110mm SSD's due to the placement of the PCIe lanes. At the bottom of the board, is the usual array of headers. Thanks to this board having RoG connections, it has the ROG_EXT header, which allows the board to connect with the RoG front panel display for overclocking and monitoring. Moving along the bottom, we see the single BIOS chip, USB 2.0 headers and front panel audio headers. Along the other side of the motherboard, we see the only M.2 port, 6x SATA 6Gb/s and 1x SATA Express ports. Opposite the I/O ports, we find the 4 DDR4 DIMMS, 24 pin power connection, USB 3.0 header and channel fan header. The Test System and Test Software Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to review our test system. Test System Motherboard varies by review CPU: Intel Core i7 6700k GPU: NVIDIA GTX 980Ti RAM: Crucial Elite 16GB (2x8GB) 2666MHz Cooling: Thermaltake Water 3.0 AIO with Gelid GC-Extreme Case: Lian Li T80 Test Bench Storage Drives: Main storage: Crucial M200 250GB, Test Devices: SanDisk Extreme Pro 240GB SSD, Plextor 256GB M6e M.2 SSD and Patriot SuperSonic Magnum 256GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive PSU: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 850W Operating System: Windows 8.1 64-bit Networking: ASUS RT-AC68U router Test Software SiSoft Sandra Engineer - available here WPrime - available here Cinebench - available here 3DMark - available here Bioshock Infinite - available here Tomb Raider - available here AIDA 64 Engineer - available here Latencymon - available here Rightmark Audio Analyser - available here LAN Speed Test Lite - available here Passmark - available here All tests are conducted three times and the average taken to use in our charts. BIOS and Overclocking Most motherboard manufacturers nowadays offer multiple BIOS styles for users to enter and tweak the system settings. The latest implementation of the BIOS type is the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) BIOS, which is a simpler version to view and interact with. Each manufacturer has a different style and each motherboard could have a different colour style. ASUS uses a very simple and consistent UEFI BIOS style, the EZ mode offers most of the functionality you would need without having to enter the Advanced Mode and delve into the depths of the settings. The red theme has a very RoG feel to it without the RoG branding. The first feature that caught my eye was the XMP profile tweaker. If your RAM is XMP enabled, it could have a profile which can easily be accessed here. EZ Tuning Wizard is ASUS' own tuning software offered from the BIOS. You pass through multiple pages and choose settings that best suit your current computer set up and determine the best and most stable overclock from a range of possible presets. Q-Fan Control is the built-in Fan control system. Interactive and simple, the user can choose either from a preset profile for each fan or choose at what temperature and how fast the fan works. EZ System Tuning is a much simpler (read: lazy) system optimisation method. Three presets (Power Saving, Normal and ASUS Optimal) are what you can choose. Heading into the Advanced Mode, you get a taste of the old style Legacy BIOS, without the horrid blue/white/red colour schemes. Even though you can use a mouse, I find it not as responsive and just choose to use a keyboard from habit. Each section is split down from Main, which is essentially an extremely basic system overview, which does exactly what it says. Ai Tweaker is probably the screen you will spend most of your time, you can adjust the CPU and DRAM settings as much as possible to get the most from your system. ASUS Ai Tweaker options are very comprehensive compared to some of the competition. With the use of the CPU_OV (overvoltage) header on the motherboard, users can overvolt their CPU to reap the maximum performance. Unless you know what you're doing, I'd leave this feature alone for the time being. The Advanced screen contains all of the important settings which really do not need to be changed and offer very little in the way of performance increases. You can choose options such as default graphics output (Discrete or onboard) or USB configurations. The Monitor tab is exactly that, it is constantly monitoring the system. Generally you only enter this page to view if fans are working correctly or to see what temperatures your CPU and motherboard are without entering the operating system. The Boot tab hosts all of the features linked to the system boot process. You can choose what type of boot you want after a power cut, whether or not you want to enable Fast Boot (default enabled) or any other possible feature you could want. The Tool tab offers some non-essential, but extremely useful applications that can optimise the system without entering the OS. Most notable is EZ Flash 3, this can install drivers and BIOS updates either through USB or an internet connection. The Exit tab is self-explanatory. You can save or erase settings you have made during your BIOS trip and exit. The Favourites tab is probably one of the most overlooked, but when used correctly it can be extreme useful. You can set key features to all display on a single page, so you can have DRAM and CPU clock speeds, multipliers and voltage control without having to trawl through the settings on the AI Tweaker page. The Quick note system can be seen as pointless, but it could be used as a guide for yourself or as an overclocking/system set up guide which you can never lose; well unless you clear CMOS or your BIOS corrupts. Overclocking Overclocking on this board was a little more difficult than usual despite the split down layout, the overclocking menu is too busy to be condensed into the centre pane. Once the correct settings were found, it was simple to overclock to a stable 4.8GHz. The Pro Gaming version of CPU-z seems to have a small lack of functionality, the Core Voltage was frozen at 1.304V and the Multiplier didn't appear. This is a small issue and will be fixed for the launch via online updates. Software Overview So the manufacturer's point of difference is not only the components it uses, but also what it can offer the user during day-to-day use. ASUS, like others, offer many different programs for you to choose from once set up which can help to make your life a little easier. Usually these programs are useless, offering bloatware or some pretty pointless programs that you wouldn't normally download. ASUS used to be the same, but have now changed and have tuned their software to be extremely useful. The main utility that ASUS provide is their AI Suite. It is now on its third revision and in that time it has come a very long way. One key point I really like about the AI Suite is the incorporation of most of the other ASUS Utilities into a simple app. The first page you arrive on is the Dual Intelligent Processors 5 page, or most recognisable as "5 Way Optimisation". This page can tune your system to your preference from three settings; Performance, Power Saving and Away Mode. All of this achieved by adjusting the five settings in the centre of the screen; TPU, Fan Xpert 3, DIGI+ VRM, Turbo App and EPU. No utility would be set without an overclocking feature. A very simple and effective approach, but maybe a little too easy for novice overclockers to adjust. The Turbo App is deceivingly simple. It basically prioritises key applications and processes in your preference of importance. This page is an extremely cut down version of the first with just Performance, Power saving and Away Mode being the only clickable options. This page is a more detailed version of Fan Xpert 3 from the first page. You can edit each fan individually, set an overall profile or even allow the system to tune the fans to the best possible setting, running through each speed to determine what each fan can run at. This is a very interesting page to include in the application. Normally to have LLC functions here are rare to see. When I was first starting into CPU overclocking, I was scared to touch LLC, but this utility makes it easy to adjust and even provides some information on the features which can sometimes be missed in the BIOS. In with the Ai Suite, you have PC Clean up, which works like most other applications, but this is bundled in with this utility and just makes the process much more hassle free than having to download a third party application. Ai charger+ is a great little feature. Having the ability to quickly charge your phone or tablet is a great relief. USB 3.1 Boost is something that I don't see why isn't implemented from factory, why have a normal mode for some end users to get confused about? EZ Update is an absolute essential utility. A simple update tool for your BIOS is great for novices and pros alike. The System Information page is exactly what it says on the tin; it just gives you the information on key parts of your system. Mobo connect is something new to me, this allows the use of your keyboard and mouse to control your connected smart device and also play music. The LED control portion of the utility is to allow the user to customise, within reason; the effects of the on board LEDs. Ai Suite also has a small widget to utilise certain features outside of Ai Suite. Game First is a utility focused on, well the gamers. Allowing you to enter (or test) your internet speed and prioritise network usage accordingly. You can prioritise by a preset option or choose the applications yourself. RAMCache is a great little app; it takes a percentage of your RAM to use as a cache (didn't see that coming did you). This speeds up your drives tremendously, but comes at a price if you have limited RAM. ASUS brought us Sonic Radar, and then made it better in the second iteration. You can tweak the sounds coming from the game in terms of frequency. If you are in a stealth game, you can tweak for foot steps; in a fire fight, or change for gun fire. An unfair advantage just got easier to take. CPU Performance Cinebench CINEBENCH is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer's CPU performance. Cinebench R15 is a totally free utility and is available for download here. Straight into the testing and it's definitely an improvement, 12% improvement across all cores but a huge 19% on the single core. WPrime wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions. wPrime is a free utility that is available for download here. 10% faster again thanks to utilising all of the cores. When overclocked it is almost as fast as the i7-5820K. SiSoft Sandra The SiSoft Sandra Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks are widely used measures of compute power and performance for a wide array of real-world usage scenarios. You can find out more details on these tests here or download SiSoft Sandra here. The core performance really shines through here, absolutely dominating both the i7-4770K and i7-5820K. GPU Performance 3DMark 3DMark Firestrike is Futuremark's latest creation for testing the GPU performance of high-end gaming PCs using Direct X 11 graphics. You can download a free basic version of 3DMark here. GPU performance is only as fast as the graphics card, unless you have a poor CPU. CPU performance and motherboard bandwidth have been a few steps off GPU's in recent years, so it's no surprise to see a knock for knock between the three boards. Tomb Raider Tomb Raider is a popular action-adventure video game published by Square Enix based on the Tomb Raider franchise. The game was released in 2013 and as of March 2014 had sold 6 million copies. Bioshock Infinite Bioshock Infinite is a first person shooter developed by Irrational Games that is the third instalment of the Bioshock series. The game is the last to be produced by Irrational Games before they announced their closure in February 2014. The game has sold over 4 million copies since its 2013 release. Similar story here again, no huge differences between the three. Memory Performance For our memory tests we use the built-in memory benchmarks in AIDA64 Engineer and SiSoft Sandra. For more details on each of the benchmarks please see here and here respectively. AIDA64 Engineer SiSoft Sandra Combined Latency Test In a similar way to the GPU performance, memory has all of the required bandwidth it needs to offer the maximum potential. The major difference here being the DDR4 used on the Z170 and X99 compared to DDR3 on the Z97. SATA, M.2 and USB Performance To test the storage performance in our motherboard reviews we use AIDA's Disk Benchmark utility built into their AIDA64 Engineer Edition software package and run linear read and write tests. We run each of the benchmark tests on a SATA III, USB 3.0 and M.2 device. For SATA III testing we use a SanDisk Extreme Pro 240GB, for USB 3.0 testing we use the Supersonic Magnum 256 GB USB 3.0 flash drive and for M.2 testing we use Plextor's 256GB M.2 M6e SSD. The drives are always formatted before use. Linear Read Linear Write M.2 read performance wasn't favourable here, which could very likely be a driver related issue. All other speeds are within an acceptable tolerance and we are starting to see the limit of the drives rather than the motherboard. Networking Performance For our networking tests we connect the test system up to our Intel Gigabit-enabled ASUS Rampage IV Extreme X79 motherboard test system through the ASUS RT-AC68U router and run our tests. We opted for this over a direct point-to-point connection because we wanted to simulate real-world performance. For our WiFi tests we do the same except we connect the test system to the ASUS RT-AC68U router via WiFi at a distance of 2 metres from the router. LAN Speed Test Lite LAN Speed Test was designed from the ground up to be a simple but powerful tool for measuring file transfer, hard drive, USB Drive, and Local Area Network (LAN) speeds (wired & wireless). It does this by building a file in memory, then transfers it both ways (without effects of windows file caching) while keeping track of the time. Download the free Lan Speed Test Lite utility from here. With Z170 sees the introduction of the new Intel-based I219V chipset. Not hugely better, but a gain is a gain, with limits here likely being the control system. Passmark Performance Test 8 The PassMark Advanced Network Test (which is part of PerformanceTest) is designed to test the data transfer rate between two computers both of which must be running PerformanceTest. One of the computers must act as the server and will sit waiting for a connection. The other computer acts as a client. It connects to the server machine and sends data to it for the duration of the test. You can download a trial version of PerformanceTest from here. Ethernet UDP scores are within the same area as the other boards, but the TCP results are far superior. CPU Work Load Something Intel LAN options always had over the competition was low CPU load; however, that seems to have failed here. Maybe Intel has noticed that it needs to sacrifice CPU load for maximum throughput. Audio Performance RightMark Audio Analyser (RMAA) RMAA suite is designed for testing quality of analog and digital paths of any audio device. The results are obtained by playing and recording test signals passed through the tested audio path by means of frequency analysis algorithms. A more common mark is also provided for those unfamiliar with measured technical parameters. Available here. We run the RMAA test using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable connecting the line out to the line in to test the quality of the motherboard audio codec not any external audio devices. We run the complete playback and recording test at default settings and then get RMAA to interpret the results giving the below outputs. We sync the playback and recording audio devices to the same setting as the test for accurate results. 16 Bit, 44KHz (DVD Quality) 16 Bit, 96KHz (Studio Quality) 24 Bit, 96KHz (Studio Quality) Some very favourable results here. This would work extremely well with the Sonic Radar feature that this motherboard offers. DPC Audio Latency Analyser DPC is a Windows tool that analyses the capabilities of a computer system to handle real-time data streams properly. It may help to find the cause for interruptions in real-time audio and video streams, also known as drop-outs. The SupremeFX codec performing well with the other ASUS motherboards. Power Consumption Power Consumption To measure power consumption we, use a "killawatt" meter and measure the total system power draw at the wall. We run three different use-case scenarios for 5 minutes and take the average reading. The 14nm processor really showing the reduced power consumption here. Final Thoughts Pricing The ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming motherboard is currently available from OverclockersUK for just £119.99. Once available from the rest of the world, we will update this article. Summary So there we have it, the Z170 chipset being unleashed onto the world. I can say that performance of the actual chipset isn't a massive improvement over Z97, but performance is greatly limited to the hardware being used such as the M.2, SATA and USB drives. What the Z170 brings to the table is the absolutely huge connectivity. As standard, it comes with USB 3.1 Type A and Type C and six USB 3.0, which was previously unheard of due to the limitations of the chipset and CPU. ASUS know how to pile on the software. You are able to download the Ai Suite, which hosts all of the usual features such as quick tuning, USB boost and fan tuning; all of these features enable you down reap the maximum potential from your system. Along with the Ai Suite, you can also download Sonic Radar, which is extremely effective during certain gameplay as you can tweak which sound frequencies you want to monitor and display them on a mini HUD to give an estimated direction of origin. Lastly is Game First III; this is an ASUS/RoG specific program that monitors your network usage and prioritises certain applications to your preference. This worked well when I tried to play Battlefield and download from iTunes; my downloads were decreased to allow for optimal connection for Battlefield. I'm not completely sold on how the board looks; maybe I'm just so used to huge heatsinks and full board covers. This is definitely a function over form design with small MOSFET heatsinks and a modest chipset heatsink. Thankfully, ASUS seem to be moving from red; if you haven't been paying attention to the latest series of motherboards from all manufacturers, they are red and very annoying to not only look at, but also design an attractive computer around. The small splashes of silver are refreshing and the overall black theme allows for a huge compatibility of colour matching components. Now onto the performance; I won't delve too much into how the i7-6700K performed here as we have a separate review for that here. The CPU performance was amazing, almost comparable to the i7-5820K which is simply amazing for a mainstream consumer CPU. The audio was extremely good, especially when coupled with the Sonic Radar software. Overall the performance of the entire board is now approaching the X99 level of performance. Something I've noticed with the Z170 chipset is the increased number of PCIe lanes, this means you can see multiple M.2 ports on a single motherboard. I think ASUS have missed out here by not including at least another port to not only enable the use of ultra-fast U.2 drives but also connect them in RAID for some seriously fast storage performance. Pros Excellent performance High quality audio Feature packed Attention to detail is second to none Low price point considering features Cons None, but an additional M.2 slot wouldn't hurt "With excellent performance and RoG features for a low price, the Z170 Pro Gaming is a great option for even the most premium of consumer." Thank you to ASUS for providing this review sample.