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- Date:
- Wednesday, April 06, 2016
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
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GIGABYTE Z170X Gaming 6 LGA 1151 Motherboard Review
GIGABYTE is back with its $165 Z170X Gaming 6 motherboard today. It’s a full featured motherboard that won’t break the bank and has a lot to offer. While many enthusiasts need what is considered high end, there are a lot of enthusiasts just looking for something that will get the job done with a few extra bells and whistles.
Introduction
GIGABYTE is a motherboard manufacturer that shouldn’t need any introduction. It’s well established and is one of the largest motherboard manufacturers in the world today, finally surpassing ASUS in number of motherboard shipments. GIGABYTE is one of the top choices for DIY builders and enthusiasts as the brand’s offerings tend to be reliable and feature rich. Over the last decade or so, I’ve had some good and bad experiences with GIGABYTE. Recently, they’ve been a bit on the mixed side as I’ve run into quite a few firmware issues with these motherboards. Chief among these are USB keyboard issues and problems with RAM compatibility. I was very impressed with the Z170X Gaming G1 and Z170X Gaming 7 motherboards. In fact, so far the entire product range in the G1 family has been excellent. At the start of the review process I have high hopes that the Z170X Gaming 6 is a solid motherboard as well.
Ideally, we would all be able to afford the highest end motherboards these companies have to offer. Unfortunately, in the real world things are not always equal. While many people might drool over the motherboards like GIGABYTE’s Z170X Gaming G1 the way one might drool over a car that they can’t afford, it’s generally pointless. Such products are out out of a realistic and affordable price range. So while an enthusiast may appreciate flagship hardware, doing so is pretty much academic at best. I think the $165 Z170X-Gaming 6 will have far more practical appeal to the gamer and PC enthusiast. That is assuming of course it does the job as advertised.
The Z170X is based on Intel’s Z170 Express chipset and is compatible with all current LGA 1151 socket based CPUs. The motherboard offers a solid feature set that is on par with motherboards commanding a higher price than this one does. The Z170X features 3x SATA Express ports, 2x M.2 ports, USB 3.1, USB 3.1 Type-C, dual gigabit NICs, and GIGABYTE’s dual BIOS system as well as specific overclocking features which we will talk about a bit later.
As one can expect from the GIGABYTE Gaming series, the feature set of the Z170X Gaming 6 is geared toward that specific target audience. GIGABYTE’s Z170X Gaming 6 has an aesthetic designed for that market. The inclusion of features such as the Killer NIC E2200, multi-GPU support for 2-Way SLI and up to 3-Way Crossfire also give the user an idea of just how this motherboard was intended to be used. The Z170X Gaming 6 uses an 8+3 phase power system that is virtually indistinguishable from the one we saw on GIGABYTE’s Z170X Gaming 6 motherboard. GIGABYTE uses a Turbo B-clock IC which allows for base clock frequency adjustments between 90MHz and 500MHz. In contrast Intel’s clock generator only goes up to around 170MHz or so though I’m unsure of how low it goes below the 100MHz default. GIGABYTE’s standard black polymer capacitors rated at 10,000 hours are used throughout the design. These features provide GIGABYTE with a solid foundation for overclocking. Technically, BIOS issues or variances in silicon lottery should theoretically allow almost the same performance we saw from the GIGABYTE Z170X Gaming 7. While not all gamers overclock, it is a target audience that has a high propensity for doing so.
Main Specifications Overview:
Detailed Specifications Overview:
Packaging
The motherboard box is relatively simple and sports the same box art design as the rest of the Z170X Gaming family. Unlike the Gaming 7 or Gaming G1, the Gaming 6 has very little in the box. Inside the package you will find the following accessories: Four SATA cables, Motherboard driver disk, I/O Shield, User's Manual, One 2-Way SLI bridge connector, Quick Installation Guide, and one G Connector. The packaging is good enough to protect the motherboard during transit. Our sample arrived with no signs of damage and all the accessories accounted for.
Board Layout
The layout of the Z170X Gaming 6 is excellent for the most part. My only real complaint is that the third PCIe x16 slot (x4 electrical) isn’t ideally spaced from the middle slot creating potential heat issues in 3-Way Crossfire configurations. Given AMD’s market share compared to NVIDIA's, and the even smaller market share of 3-Way Crossfire configurations I suspect this isn’t a deal breaker for most people. The overall build quality of the Z170X Gaming 6 is decent, but lacking compared to the expensive Gaming 7 and Gaming G1 motherboards. The PCB is very thin. It’s about as thin, but definitely straighter than ASRock’s lower end PCBs. This doesn’t impact functionality necessarily, although in my experience these thinner Z170 motherboards do not tend to clock memory as high as thicker motherboards do. I am not implying that thickness is the reason, but it’s something I have observed.
The CPU socket area is generally clear of obstructions. The 8+3 phase power design can clearly be seen with chokes and other components flanking the CPU socket which uses 15μ gold plated pins. The MOSFET cooling hardware seems quite robust, although it’s not nearly as beefy as what you would find on the Z170X Gaming G1 or the Gaming 7. The machine work and design seems adequate at first glance and gives the motherboard a high rent feeling when you aren’t thinking about the overly-built higher-end motherboards. The design leaves enough space that most CPU coolers should fit on the motherboard without any issues. The most likely issue you’d run into will be clearance with the memory modules if anything. Just to the left of the CPU socket you will find one of the motherboards M.2 slots. It is 4x PCIe compliant and supports NVMe devices.
The RAM slots are color coded to denote proper dual channel memory mode operation. The 4x 288-pin DDR4 DIMM slots support up to 64GB of RAM at speeds up to 3466MHz through overclocking. Single sided locking tabs are utilized to avoid the need to space the memory further away from the expansion slot area. The memory slots are color coded black and red to denote which slots correspond to a given memory channel. A single phase identical to the CPU phases is used for the memory subsystem.
The chipset is located in the bottom left hand quadrant of the motherboard. It has an aesthetically pleasing heat sink which is flat enough to avoid creating issues with expansion cards. The motherboards SATA ports are located directly in front of the chipset as expected. Again the attention to detail seems nice and the heat sink does give the motherboard a more premium appearance.
The expansion slot area is generally well thought out. My only complaint is the aforementioned issues with using 3 video cards with this motherboard due to the spacing being less than ideal. Again, this shouldn’t generally be an issue as very few people would ever actually use this motherboard in that way. If you must, this motherboard can handle that with AMD cards. Whether we are talking about AMD or NVIDIA, there are simply other choices out there which are better. Albeit, more expensive generally speaking. The Z170X Gaming 6 supports an 8x8x4 lane configuration using the PCIe x16 slots. There are also 4x PCIe x1 slots. All the expansion slots are PCIe gen 3.0 compliant.
The I/O panel wastes a fair amount of space. There is plenty of real estate that could have been allocated to more connectivity options. With that said that the Z170X Gaming 6 lacks the massive amount of hardware integration present on motherboards sold in higher price brackets. On the back panel you will find the following ports: 1x combination PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, 2x USB DAC UP USB 2.0 ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports, 3x USB 3.0 ports, 1x USB 3.1 Type-A port, 1x USB 3.1 Type-C port, 1x HDMI port, 1x DisplayPort, 2x RJ-45 Ethernet ports, 5x mini-stereo headphone jacks and 1x optical output.
The DAC UP ports are color coded yellow to let the user know where they are. These ports utilize an isolated power circuit which prevents noise and other interference when using an external USB audio DAC. The 5x mini-stereo jacks are gold plated, but lack the color coding that the G1 had. This is unfortunate when you have to crawl behind your system to connect speakers or headphones and can’t see which ports correspond to different inputs.