Intel unveiled its Skylake architecture ii months ago with the acme Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K chips. Today, a locked and lower clocked version of the 6700K, the 6700 is as well available, as are the Core i5-6600, 6500 and 6400. As of writing, we are as well beginning to see the inflow of Skylake Core i3, Pentium and Celeron processors.

Launched alongside new Skylake processors are accompanying motherboards using the Intel Z170 chipset that become from $100 right up to $500 for the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming G1. Having that said, most capable Z170 motherboards can be had for around $200 to $250 and today we'll be looking at half dozen options in this bracket.

Asrock Z170 Extreme7+ Asus ROG Maximus VIII Hero Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 MSI Z170A Gaming M7 Supermicro MBD-C7Z170-SQ EVGA Z170 FTW
Price $240 $230 $220 $210 $200 $190
Class Gene ATX 305 x 244mm ATX 305 10 244mm ATX 305 x 244mm ATX 305 x 244mm ATX 305 ten 244mm ATX 305 x 244mm

Besides Read: Intel Z170 vs. Z97 chipset: What is the difference?

The more expensive lath in our roundup is the Asrock Z170 Extreme7+ at $240 and the cheapest the EVGA Z170 at $190, with the others filling the gap in-between. Functioning is likely to be similar as they are based on the same chipset, but we'll explore each one by one to meet what makes them special with a roundup of features earlier we conclude this article.

A large thank you to Asrock, MSI, Supermicro and Asus for providing their products without any strings attached; the others we bought outright to complete the roundup as marketing departments at those companies were far less cooperative.

Asrock Z170 Extreme7+

The Asrock Z170 Extreme7+ is an aggressive looking lath featuring a blackness on black blueprint with a little bit of gold bling here and at that place. Information technology's the kind of motherboard that would suit most builds and we constitute information technology looked particularly impressive with the Palit GTX 980 Ti JetStream graphics carte installed.

Equipped with a 12 power stage design the 60A ability asphyxiate and combo capacitors (820uF and 100uF) ensures enough of make clean, efficient and responsive power delivery to the CPU.

The Z170 Extreme7+ comes equipped with iv full length PCIe 3.0 slots, though information technology should be noted that not all are wired for x16 bandwidth and 4-way multi-GPU technology isn't supported using four discrete graphics cards.

Like all the motherboards featured in our roundup, SLI and Crossfire are express to 3-style configurations using x8/x8/x4 bandwidth while dual cards will operate in the x8/x8 fashion.

And so the Z170 Extreme7+ is a niggling overambitious with its PCIe configuration and you tin can't even promise to use the fourth slot for a PCIe SSD as the bandwidth would take already been eaten up by other devices.

This is likewise a problem for the vast amount of storage options found on the Z170 Extreme7+. Go on in mind while there are up to 16 different storage options, the Z170 isn't designed to be used in file server computers, and with limited bandwidth the Z170 Extreme7+ has to share its 3 M.2 slots with the SATA 6Gb/southward ports.

Each K.2 slot is shared with a pair of SATA ports and consequently a SATA Limited port, forcing users to cull one or the other. For example if yous were to install an M.2 SSD in each ane of the three Grand.two slots the Z170 Extreme7+ would be left with simply 4 SATA 6Gb/s ports. In short, while there are 16 storage interfaces in total, a maximum of 10 and minimum of 7 can be used at the aforementioned time.

While the Z170 Extreme7+'southward storage capabilities aren't nearly equally impressive as they kickoff announced, the lath is still flexible. We also really appreciate that each Grand.2 slot can support the full range of M.2 devices, with support for 30, 42, 60, lxxx and 110mm carte lengths.

In full there are 10 SATA 6Gb/s ports, 3 SATA Limited ports and 3 M.2 slots.

Asrock is the only lath maker in our roundup to offering a mini-PCI Express slot which could be handy for adding wireless networking to the board.

The Z170 Extreme7+ is rocking Asrock'due south Purity Sound three which features the Realtek ALC1150 codec, a solution they accept been using for years now. Purity Sound three incorporates a headphone amplifier, a 115dB SNR DAC with a differential amplifier, Direct Drive applied science, Nichicon fine gilt series audio caps, EMI shielding encompass and PCB isolated shielding.

For networking, Asrock has included Intel'south I219V PHY and I211AT controllers, which back up Wake-On-LAN, Energy Efficient Ethernet 802.3az and PXE while the I217V offers Intel Remote Wake Technology. Together, the pair can also exist used for teaming.

In total the Z170 Extreme7+ provides eight USB three.0 ports and 4 USB iii.1 ports. Establish on the I/O console are four USB three.0 ports and ii USB three.ane ports (Type-A port and Type-C port). An additional four USB 3.0 ports tin be installed using on-board headers.

Finally the additional ii USB iii.one ports are provided via a five.25" front panel adapter which offers i Type-A port and Type-C port. This front panel module is connected to the motherboard using i of those useless SATA Express ports, so it is skillful to see Asrock making utilize of what has proven to be a useless interface thus far.

Along with the USB 3.0 and USB 3.i ports users volition also observe on the I/O panel ii USB ii.0 ports, DisplayPort, DVI-D, HDMI, dual Gigabit LAN ports and five sound jacks and an optical audio output.

The Asrock UEFI is well designed and laid out, it provides plenty of advanced tweaking options for enthusiasts while it provides an effective means of overclocking for beginners. The Windows based A-Tuning software as well works well and makes overclocking extremely easy. We like how users tin adjust fan settings here every bit well.