Gigabyte GA-Z270X Gaming 7 review - A motherboard tested

Gigabyte Z270X GAMING 7
The new Kaby Lake platform 

With the 7000 series processor (Kaby Lake) announced, it's time for a peek at the motherboards based on Z270. In this review we'll discuss the Gigabyte GA-Z270X Gaming 7, in a wide variety of benchmarks and situations. We review the Gigabyte Z270X GAMING 7 with an Core i5 7600K processor. That puppy is developed on the 14nm node the Core i5 series processors are intended to be the more budget friendly offering from Intel, for a more mainstream consumer. For this review we look at the performance of this processor and motherboard in a wide variety of benchmarks and situations.

Kaby Lake processors for the desktop platform have been released. Though you'd think it is an all new chip, however it is merely a respin seen from Skylake, meaning both series processors are Socket 1151. This also means that IF you are in the market for a new series 7000 processor, your H170 or Z170 motherboard can be compatible with Kaby Lake after a motherboard BIOS upgrade. The new series Kaby Lake processors are fairly energy efficient, still as powerful as they have been for years. If you are interested in new technologies like Intel Optane, you will however need to upgrade to a Z270 and H270 range motherboard. This new Z270 platform offers supports for Optane SSDs and offers supports for slightly faster DDR4 memory.
 
  

 
For this review Gigabyte thus submitted their Z270X GAMING 7 motherboard, an aesthetically pleasing platform fitted with the latest that technology can house like up-to 40000+ MHZ XMP DDR4 memory, the fastest NVMe PCIe and M.2. storage unit support and 40 Gb/s Thunderbolt functionality. The Z270X GAMING 7 comes with two M.2. slot, and combined with an PCIe M2 storage unit you could even set these up in RAID0 (albeit RAID is a bit of a thing of the past for consumers ever since SSDs emerged. 

Gigabyte takes it a step further though, with lovely sound as they embedded a Creative Labs Core 3D audio solution with accompanying SBX Pro Studio audio suite as well as RGB fusion.
  

 
Yes of course this motherboard takes part in the RGB hype that has found its way into pretty much any PC component that you can plug into something :) 

Obviously there is a lot more going on, what we like for example is that this motherboard offers both a Killer E2500 and Intel Gigabit LAN connector, so you can choose whichever one you prefer. Armed with that Z270 chipset this motherboard offers three x16 slots: 1x PCIe 3.0 x16, 1x 3.0 x8 and one 3.0 x4. But yeah. Let's get started with the actual review shall we?