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Gigabyte Z170-Gaming K3 LGA1151 Motherboard Review

Motherboards/Intel S1151 by stefan @ 2016-12-15

The Gigabyte GA-Z170-Gaming K3 motherboard was built from scratch for the mainstream segment but this does not mean that it is not a capable product: it is packed with support for some of the latest technologies as USB 3.1, metallic shielding over the main PCI-E slot, a Gen3 x4 M.2 connector for installing additional storage, 2 SATA Express connector(plus two regular SATA 3), one ALC1150 HD Audio codec with built-in rear audio amplifier, a Killer E2200 Gigabit LAN adapter for minimizing in-game lag and more.

Test Setup and Extra Info

Test Setup

CPU: Intel I5 6600K Retail

CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-SOC FORCE LGA1151

RAM: Patriot Viper 2x4GB DDR4 2400MHz @ 2133MHz

Video: HIS 380X

Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W

SSD: OCZ Vector 150

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840

With the Z170X-Gaming K3 LGA1151 motherboard, we have attempted overclocking and succeeded at 4.6GHz; one mention is that we needed to climb a bit with the voltage further, since we did not have aggressive Loadline Calibration settings available inside the BIOS as with the SOC Force model:

Here is also the validation:

(click to enlarge)

We have tested for stability at 4.6GHz with Prime95:

(click to enlarge)

High speed memory is also no problem for this board since we have tested the G.SKILL TridentZ 32GB 3200MHz DDR4 (F4-3200C15D-32GTZ) kit with it; no issues were encountered after a bit of voltage tuning, the XMP profile being recognized perfectly fine. Initially, when we have loaded the XMP profile, the RAM was running at 3066MHz after the reboot; in order to enable operation at 3200MHz and boot at the same frequency perfectly stable we had to set a manual voltage of the System Agent to 1V inside the BIOS:

Here are some other info we have extracted from the system thanks to the AIDA64 utility:

Motherboard

IMC

PCH

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