Product Showcase
The Z170 chipset will bring six Intel chipset based SATA 6 Gb/s storage ports to the motherboard. With an added ASMedia ASM1061 controller two more have been added. SATA Express is supported. Included is a M.2. PCI Express slot, this received an upgrade from 1x PCI Express lane towards x4, giving the port not 10 GB/sec but 32 GB/sec performance. There are many USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports available through internal connectors motherboard connectors.
The weird looking SATA connectors to the left is 2 x SATA Express port, and totally useless ... to the far left one 1 x U.2 port.
You will get four DIMM slots offering support for dual-channel DDR4 memory up to even 3866 MHz (OC). If you activate the XMP 2.0 profile in the BIOS, your memory will be automatically configured for you at its maximum clock speed and recommended voltage. You can install a maximum of 64 GB in total. Again, XMP 2.0 must be supported, we'll show you this petite setup running at 2133 and 3200 MHz. The board has nice dark capacitors, we can see the diagnostic LED here (displays status/error codes and in the OS the package temperature of the processor).
Overall a terrific design really, aesthetically pleasing to the eyes as well. The PCH (Intel Z170 chipset) chip is covered by a nice heatsink, shield almost, once activated a red LED will create an aura of light from that heat-sink. It looks pretty nice, I'll show you that on a photo on the next page.
Underneath the shield is the audio solution. The motherboard makes use of ROG SupremeFX 2015 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC (ESS ES9023P DAC) and TI RC4580 2VRMS audio OP AMPs. It is amazing to see how well audio has ramped up over the standard Realtek codecs lately. We like that very much.
The board also has buttons for reset / power and a number of micro-switches for the standard features like memOK!, ClearCMOS, EPU and easy XMP. There's a lot of lighting going on, I will show you that on the next page.
I'd have expected a full size shield on this rather expensive motherboard, that is not the case; though the critical VRm hotspots and chipset did get extra cooling heatsinks.
