The Asus Prime Z270-A & GIGABYTE Z270X-Ultra Gaming Motherboard Review
by E. Fylladitakis on July 18, 2017 10:45 AM ESTTest 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 the Asus Prime Z270-A and the GIGABYTE Z270X-Ultra Gaming had multi-core acceleration enabled by default. We tested the Asus Prime Z270-A with the 0604 BIOS and the GIGABYTE Z270X-Ultra Gaming with the F6 BIOS.
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-7700K (ES, Retail Stepping), 91W, $340 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 4.2 GHz (4.5 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | Asus Prime Z270-A GIGABYTE GA-Z270X-Ultra Gaming |
| Cooling | Alphacool Eisbaer 240 |
| Power Supply | Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory | G.Skill DDR4-2400 C15 2x16 GB 1.2V |
| Memory Settings | XMP @ 2400 |
| Video Cards | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) |
| Hard Drive | Crucial MX200 1TB |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
Many thanks to Alphacool, Corsair, G.Skill, MSI and Crucial for contributing to our test bed.
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JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Yeah, at some indeterminate time after Windows 7 launch, it seems boot times have gone down the drain. Kinda funky how the best boot times I ever had on a PC was with a first generation SSD on SATA II, but today, with an MLC-based PCI-e M.2 SSD that's supposed to be orders of magnitude faster... is actually slower when booting.I never cared too much to investigate, though. I tend to let my PCs sleep overnight rather than full shut downs, and waking from sleep has been pretty quick still.
Rocket321 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Doesn't XP only need about 150MB in Ram on a clean boot? Compared to... Like 2GB in Win10. I guess all the new hardware power keeps us out of 3.5 minute boot times.StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
Does it really matter if a system boots in 3 seconds or 15 seconds? Booting a system isn't where you spend most of your time.Dug - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
I agree. I have an old Gigabyte sandy bridge mini itx motherboard that takes just a few seconds to boot, even with windows 10.Not sure what is going on here, unless the motherboards are doing more checks.
SeeManRun - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
I am actually a bit disappointed in my Prime Z270-A. I have been using it for several months. When trying the XMP profile, the board will not POST. When adjusting certain settings in the BIOS, it doesn't recognize something has changed and won't change the settings. There are other nitpicks around, like it sometimes comes out of sleep and seems to be "on" but nothing seems to be powered up. The GPU light is on, but no lights on anything else work. I have to hold power for 6 seconds and boot it back up. No idea what is happening with this.This board might be my last ASUS board after about 6 in a row.
blurp - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
I own the same Mobo. No issue at all with XMP (Corsair Vengeance LED 16GB 2X8GB : supported by Asus). No issue either with sleep with current drivers in Win 10. Flawless. Left Gigabyte (Z97) with their subpar UEFI bios. Moreover the is minimal support with SpeedFan because the data sheet for the integrated fan controler is not public.SeeManRun - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
You are having better luck than I then. My memory is also Corsair Vengeance (2x16GB) CMU32GX4M2C3000C15B. I have read that to run XMP you may need to overclock your processor, but this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. No other computers I have encounter the same issue.Dug - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
XMP profile, while meant to be a nice easy solution can be a hit or miss for any motherboard/ ram combo.Just enter in timings manually. May have to set system agent voltage and io voltage anywhere from 1.15- 1.25.
e1jones - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
I used this Gigabyte board in my desktop built early this year. After building a Asus 170-series based computer for my brother I decided to avoid them (also had no USB2 back panel ports and some weird issue installing windows from USB) and stick to Gigabyte which served me very well on my prior desktop.I chose this particular model because it has Intel Ethernet (vs Killer primarily) and the U.2 port for some amount of future proofing if that standard ever takes off before I build the next one. I didn't realize the power delivery was so short on phases, but I don't exactly overclock at all, so hopefully its not an issue. Yes, they have the SATA-Express as well, but I'm beginning to wonder if that'll ever go anywhere.
Something that wasn't mentioned is that the 2 yellow USB 3 ports are their DAC-UP ports with some sort of special isolated power/low noise delivery system.
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
"The GIGABYTE Z270X Ultra Gaming features a native U.2 PCIe ×4 connector and SATA Express ports: both of which are storage interfaces that we rarely see implemented on sub-$170 motherboards that are targeted towards gamers."These ports are such a waste, especially SATA Express. 0 devices support that and 1 aging SSD supports U.2.