the board and on the underside
make for a rather pleasing
product that doesn’t in anyway
shout out its retail price.
Compare that with say other
alternatives at this price point
and you’ll realize this quickly.
While, many enthusiasts could
not care about the looks of
any motherboard. One would
wager that price conscious
buyers at this range care
deeply about such things
as these are not frequent
buyers of hardware upgrading
motherboards every six or 12
months. As such this is a long
term investment at least as far
as PC DIY components go.
We see the silver or metallic
framing around the slots
and DRAM socket and the
whole thing comes together
well. Again, this is something
GIGABYTE should carry
forward instead of yet another
change to the colors that
represent the brand.
So if you’re only looking
to buy into Z170 now for
some reason, then you
may be wondering why this
particular motherboard.
Well other than price, you’ll
be pleased to know that this
board officially supports
DDR4 3866MHz DIMMs.
The chances are if you’re
budget conscious you’re not
looking at high performance
expensive memory, but
this is still relevant for the
following reason and others.
DDR4 3466MHz can be had
for as little as $60 for 8GB,
perhaps even less. What
we have found with such
memory is that it will often
overclock to 3866MHz IMC
willing, but we’ve yet to
come across a 6600K or a
6700K that cannot manage
this and far beyond. With
that said, such frequencies
were not guaranteed with the
previous or 1st generation
Z170 motherboards and as we
found in our initial testing we
could only get to 3,600MHz
on a number of those initial
models.
With that as well, the Z170X
Ultra-Gaming is fairly easy
to overclock memory on. If
you’re willing to settle for a
command rate of 2T, then it’s
a simple matter of dialing
Issue 39 | 2016 The OverClocker 35