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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A5 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
A good comparison review of products that people will actually buy instead of the $500 monstrosities we normally see. Thanks.theuglyman0war - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
The only reason I invested in flagship enthusiast bait was to bet on the components being built to last and stand up to harsh worst case scenarios.Considering they were built to handle punishment under ln2 extremes.
But they usually went on sale fairly quickly after the initial release. ( the rampage extreme III I am still sitting on I bought for well under $400 in about 3 months after release )
I assume those days are over?
Which is a shame considering the punishing volt experiementation and water accidents I have had...
Hedging my bets on the expensive caps and mosfets have seemingly bought me longevity to wait out this incremental expensive hell!
In the interim on client builds...
I been getting the mil spec bait instead.
A comparison between the mil spec branded stuff between gigabyte and asus would be interesting as well as an honest exploration whether as much is actually of a grade that might guarantee longevity/abuse? Or manufacturer ad nauseam abuse that offers no value compared to server grade branded stuff? ( asus prime ).
Is there a mil spec ansi standard that is legally meaningful?
The relative cheap price compared to the gaming flagship bait seems reasonable.
But I am not even sure about server grade claims? Compared to say...
The expense of Super Micro?
I close my eyes n just buy the cheapest "tuf" branded boards n cross my fingers.
OddFriendship8989 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
I can't comment about these two boards specifically, but I've used the Gaming K7 and Maximus IX Hero, and while I feel Gigabyte tends to be more generous in features, as someone who overclocks, I really need the Adaptive voltage setting that's missing from GIgabyte boards.RiZad - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
"The default boot time of both the Asus Prime Z270-A and the GIGABYTE Z270X-Ultra Gaming is very good, with 12.6 seconds for the former and 13.4 seconds for the latter" something is wrong with the graph for that because thats not at all what is shown. it seems to have the default and stripped reversed. the other 2 points of comparison show default on top, stripped under.jbrl - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Would have really liked to see a comparison to a 170 board with the updated bios. Otherwise, why should I drop a few hundred extra on a new board?A5 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
If you're already on a Z170 board there is no reason to upgrade.jbrl - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Thanks, that is what I was thinking. I guess they can't put that in the review because asus will stop sending them samples.shabby - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Ultra gaming tactical pro sli ftw edition... this is getting a bit absurd.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
While there is certainly a proliferation of longer names, I feel these motherboard names are not excessively long. Sure, they could be shorter, but I feel that it doesn't give off an "Ultra gaming tactical pro sli ftw thor odin lightning edition" vibeBullwinkle J Moose - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Boot Times look Horrible!I wish Intel would streamline their chipset for speed
I remember how a 1st gen ATOM motherboard with IDE/serial and parallel ports and 2GB Max Ram booted several seconds faster than the 2nd Gen ATOM with 4GB Ram due to the chipset features
Faster CPU's require faster chipsets streamlined for speed freaks!
A stock install of Windows XP on a sammy 840 or 850 Pro boots in 3 seconds on a 35 Watt dualcore Sandy Bridge
A stock install of Windows 10 takes alsmost 10 seconds longer to boot on the same system
disregarding the O.S., chipset features and BIOS should advance with the CPU to match the boot speeds of ancient systems
Why is no-one questioning what is actually limiting the boot speeds on newer systems?
I don't think you can "really" fix this with a different brand of motherboard
We can see that some brands do better than others, but I would think that a sammy 960 Pro booting Win 10 on a new 4+Ghz quadcore CPU could (or should) beat an ancient dualcore system at half the clockspeed in boot times
After all, Win 7 was optimized and advertised as booting faster than XP
Win 8 was optimized and advertised as being faster than Win 7
and Windows Spyware Platform 10 was supposed to be faster than Windows 8.1
What gives?
This is DEFINITELY not fake news!