ASUS Z170-A Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 28.10.15Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| It quite obvious that the Z170-A from ASUS is a product, which attacks with competitive pricing. In Europe this board is listed with prices starting at roughly 140 Euro. For this kind of money you get a motherboard with good looking design and quite a few interesting features. There is for instance a beefed-up audio solution and good flexibility when it comes to connecting storage devices. For that purpose ASUS equipped this board with SATA and SATA Express connectors as well as M.2 slot. | -
Design - Layout - Price |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| The ASUS Z170-A's layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors but there are no practical power- and reset-buttons and also a debug LED is missing in order to keep the cost down. Apart from that we like the placement of the PCI-Express x16 slots. There is a total of three full sized PCI Express slots and between the first two PCI Express x16 slots there are two PCIe x1 slots. This means that there is plenty of space for graphics card in multi GPU setups to breathe. As we already mentioned we also like the flexibility regarding storage connectors. | -
Angled SATA
connectors - Space around the CPU socket - Placement of PCIe slots - Number of different storage connectors |
- No power/reset button and no debug LED | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks results we ran, we see that this board scores 7th. When taking the average of all 2D results, this board comes in 8th out of 11 boards tested. On another note, we had a look at power consumption, where we see that this board is quite power hungry. |
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- SiSoft Sandra Multimedia - Tomb Raider High - Metro Last Light - Power Consumption |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| ASUS has a beautiful looking BIOS when it comes to their Signature series motherboards. The UEFI BIOS gets a black background and there are a few additional blue and white design elements. Meanwhile it's almost normal that a BIOS is complete, offering countless features. If you're looking for overclocking options you'll find a great many of them and they are equally practical for novices and extreme overclockers. We always love the pre-defined profiles, which make overclocking quite a bit more efficient. Boosting our CPU to 5.0 GHz was absolutely no problem at all. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The Z170-A is a competitively priced Z170 motherboard. If you're looking for an ASUS ATX motherboard and you're budget is limited, then you can consider this board. | - Entry Level ATX | ||
| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Z170-A excellent 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
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