Gigabyte Z170-Gaming K3 (LGA1151) Motherboard Review

CPU & GPU Performance

Cinebench

The motherboard’s stock CPU performance is very good when you take the price point into consideration and it manages to outclass many higher priced options.

When overclocked, the Z170-Gaming K3 fares superbly and isn’t too far off attaining a top three ranking. This is astonishing and showcases the wonderful price to performance ratio on offer.

WPrime

In terms of single-threaded compute performance, the motherboard does pretty well and achieves a good calculation time.

The overclocked results aren’t as competitive but it’s nothing to be overly concerned about due to the small margin between various products.

SiSoft Sandra

In a similar fashion, the motherboard attains a laudable mid-tier result and pushes above its weight rather well.

Once overclocked, the Z170-Gaming K3 continues to shine although there is some room for improvement to match the top results. Despite this, it’s still a great score and within a respectable margin of mid-table figures.

3DMark

Here we can see the motherboard once paired with the GTX 980Ti, performs brilliantly and obtains one of the best 3DMark results so far. Admittedly, this is mostly due to driver improvements from NVIDIA but it’s great to see the impeccable performance in 3D tasks.

Tomb Raider

During the Tomb Raider benchmark, the Z170-Gaming K3 soared into first place and reported fantastic numbers in both 1080P and 1440P testing.

Bioshock Infinite

However, the results weren’t as strong in Bioshock Infinite and we can see a noticeable drop in the overall ranking. Upon further inspection, it’s clear the 1080P performance is wonderful and worthy of commendation but the 2560×1440 run fell a little bit behind compared to other options. The gap to these though is minuscule and you have to take that into account when analyzing its gaming credentials.