The GIGABYTE Z170X-Ultra Gaming & Z170X-Designare Motherboard Review

Test Bed and Setup

Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, overriding memory sub-timings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.

For reference, both of the Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Designare and the GA-Z170X-Ultra Gaming on our testing BIOS F20, MCT was enabled by default. Also, the FCLK 10x ratio was present in the BIOS tested at the time of testing.

System Performance

System Performance

Not all motherboards are created equal. On the face of it, they should all perform the same and differ only in the functionality they provide - however this is not the case. The obvious pointers are power consumption, but also the ability for the manufacturer to optimize USB speed, audio quality (based on audio codec), POST time and latency. This can come down to manufacturing process and prowess, so these are tested.

Power Consumption

Power consumption was tested on the system while in a single MSI GTX 770 Lightning GPU configuration with a wall meter connected to the Corsair AX1200i power supply. This power supply is Platinum rated, and as I am on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.

The consumption of the GA-Z170X-Designare and GA-Z170X-Ultra Gaming motherboards while the system is idling is relatively low, lower than what we initially anticipated from high end boards with this many LEDs attached. When under load, the demand of both boards reaches the anticipated 130-135 Watt figures, which are an efficiency improvements over Gigabyte's own previous implementations of the Z170 chipset.

Non UEFI POST Time

Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we look at the POST Boot Time using a stopwatch. This is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows 7 starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.) 

Both of the GA-Z170X-Designare and the GA-Z170X-Ultra Gaming do extremely well in our POST time analysis, with the best default POST time that we have seen to this date. However, if any of the fast boot options are enabled or controllers are manually disabled, the POST time of both of these boards slows to a crawl. As a matter of fact, the more controllers are disabled, the longer the POST waiting time is. This is a problem that we have encountered with other Gigabyte boards in the past as well and one that the company ought to fix, or at least remove the fast boot option from the BIOS altogether.

Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.2.5

Rightmark:AA indicates how well the sound system is built and isolated from electrical interference (either internally or externally). For this test we connect the Line Out to the Line In using a short six inch 3.5mm to 3.5mm high-quality jack, turn the OS speaker volume to 100%, and run the Rightmark default test suite at 192 kHz, 24-bit. The OS is tuned to 192 kHz/24-bit input and output, and the Line-In volume is adjusted until we have the best RMAA value in the mini-pretest. We look specifically at the Dynamic Range of the audio codec used on board, as well as the Total Harmonic Distortion + Noise.

In this test there is a very large gap between the two boards that we are reviewing here today. The performance figures of the GA-Z170X-Designare and its ALC1150 codec are excellent, on the higher end of the scale when compared to other comparable boards, even boards featuring the same codec. On the other hand, the ALC892 codec of the GA-Z170X-Ultra Gaming is struggling to deliver performance figures that are merely passable for a quality gaming motherboard.

USB Backup

For this benchmark, we transfer a set size of files from the SSD to the USB drive using DiskBench, which monitors the time taken to transfer. The files transferred are a 1.52 GB set of 2867 files across 320 folders – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second HD videos. In an update to pre-Z87 testing, we also run MaxCPU to load up one of the threads during the test which improves general performance up to 15% by causing all the internal pathways to run at full speed.

Due to the introduction of USB 3.1, as of June 2015 we are adjusting our test to use a dual mSATA USB 3.1 Type-C device which should be capable of saturating both USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 connections. We still use the same data set as before, but now use the new device. Results are shown as seconds taken to complete the data transfer.

The USB 3.0 performance of the GA-Z170X-Designare and the GA-Z170X-Ultra Gaming is good when compared to any other Z170-based motherboard that we have reviewed to this date.

Also, like other Alpine Ridge motherboards, these two motherboards break our test for USB 3.1 and we were unable to get a result. Unlike our previous encounters with motherboards featuring the same IC, where our software indicated the copy being finished before it actually has finished, these two motherboards actually unmount the entire device during the time that the test takes place, never completing the file transfer at all. This may be down to our hardware, which was a beta model when USB 3.1 first came to market. More investigation is needed.

DPC Latency

Deferred Procedure Call latency is a way in which Windows handles interrupt servicing. In order to wait for a processor to acknowledge the request, the system will queue all interrupt requests by priority. Critical interrupts will be handled as soon as possible, whereas lesser priority requests such as audio will be further down the line. If the audio device requires data, it will have to wait until the request is processed before the buffer is filled.

If the device drivers of higher priority components in a system are poorly implemented, this can cause delays in request scheduling and process time.  This can lead to an empty audio buffer and characteristic audible pauses, pops and clicks. The DPC latency checker measures how much time is taken processing DPCs from driver invocation. The lower the value will result in better audio transfer at smaller buffer sizes. Results are measured in microseconds.

Properly addressing the DPC latency of motherboards provides an interesting dynamic in the industry, with some vendors implementations frequently scoring well over 200 μs in this test. Today we see that GIGABYTE made quite an improvement with the GA-Z170X-Ultra Gaming, dropping the DPC latency to 167 μs, a figure not quite as good as some of the competition nowadays offers but a significant improvement nonetheless. The more expensive but complex GA-Z170X-Designare displays a smaller improvement, but an improvement over our past >250 μs figures, with a DPC latency of 213 μs.