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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The_Assimilator - Thursday, July 20, 2017 - link
TBH, it seems that unless you're looking to do some hardcore overclocking on the cheap, Gigabyte's board is the clear winner here in terms of features.halcyon - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
This would have been an interesting review in... January, 6 months ago. Now it's a dead-end platform, everybody's waiting for Z370 late this year and Z390 early next year. Not to mention X299 and X399 mobo reviews.Dug - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Seeing how bad the x299 rollout is, I think you'll be waiting a lot longer than that for Z370, so this is very relevant for people that don't sit around and wait for the next best thing.malireddyk - Monday, September 18, 2017 - link
Doh!