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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.

The BIOS Interface Part I

The Z170-Gaming K3 board is equipped with a nice looking UEFI interface, which does also include an Easy Mode. Monitoring widgets can be also found on the right side of the screen, while on the lower right we can access Q-Flash for updating the BIOS or Smart Fan options for fine-tuning the fan speeds:

Coming back to the standard UEFI interface, we’ve got multiple menus available; the first one is M.I.T, which is the first place to go in order to fine-tune the system performance. Several sub-menus can be found here:

-Advanced Frequency Settings

-Advanced Memory Settings

-Advanced Voltage Settings

-PC Health Status

-Miscellaneous Settings

Here we can also access the Smart Fan 5 Settings:

The Advanced Frequency Settings menu does allow the user to perform CPU overclocking, but also adjust the memory clocks (XMP or manual):

Advanced CPU Core Settings can be also accessed from here:

The Advanced Memory Settings menu allows us to choose from different XMP profiles, adjust the memory multiplier manually, the reference clock, the Odd Ratio, frequency at boot and more:

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