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All aboard the Skylake: How Intel stopped worrying and learned to love overclocking

6th gen CPU and swanky Asus mobo on test

Asus Z-170 Deluxe

So how does that all work in practice? To test the new desktop platform I’m using an Asus Z-170 Deluxe, the flagship board of the Signature series. Right from the word go, you know this is one of company’s special boards just by the sheer weight of the box alone.

If motherboard aesthetics are your thing, then the Z-170 Deluxe should impress. The black PCB is set off by large white shroud covering the rear I/O panel which then runs the whole length of the board. Seen together with the heatsink design, it certainly makes the board grab your attention.

Asus Z-170 Deluxe motherboard

Asus Z-170 Deluxe motherboard. Click for a larger image

Some serious thought has been put in on the power design of the board, as it has a fully digital 16-phase design, plus an extra 4-phases solely for the iGPU. The board also features the Socket 1151 version of Asus’s modified OC socket (first seen on its X99 boards) which has extra pins that, in theory, should improve the overclocking stability and power delivery capabilities of the Skylake K CPUs.

If you are thinking about getting a platform for trying out the new storage formats as well as futureproofing, then the Z-170 Deluxe isn’t a bad place to start. On board is a 32Gb/s M.2 x4 PCIe socket with clearly marked mounts to take M.2 drives from the 2242 format all the way up to 22110, and Asus bundle in a U.2 NVMe convertor board.

If you go down that route, which takes up the on-board M.2 socket, then there is an M2 x4 PCIe mini card included as well, which supports all the M.2 size formats. Moreover, both of the M.2 options can be built into three different RAID 0 arrays (U.2 NVMe / PCIe NVMe, U.2 NVMe / M.2 x4 mini card or on-board M.2/ M.2 x4 mini card) for some serious transfer speeds. There’s also SATA Express support as well as six standard SATA 6Gb/s ports.

Asus Z-170 Deluxe motherboard USB 3.1

USB 3.1 ports aplenty

You want USB 3.1 support? Well, certainly sir. How about five Type A (backwards compatible) ports and a Type C port to be getting on with? These are controlled by an AS Media IC. The Z170 chipset supports single USB3.0 and 2.0 ports on the rear I/O panel, as well as headers on the motherboard supporting four more ports of both speeds.

Completing the back I/O panel are single HDMI and DisplayPorts, an optical S/PDIF port, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and three – yes three – connectors for the tri-streamed 802.11ac dual band Wi-Fi and Asus bundles in one of its own 3T3R antennas in the box for it.

There are three Gen3.0 x16 PCIe slots, the top one of the three runs at x16 speed or if the top pair are used then x8/x8, while the third slot runs at x4. In addition to these three, there are four PCIe x1 ports. Four DIMM slots support up a maximum of 64GB of DDR4 with speeds from 2133MHz up to a stonking 3733MHz via overclocking.

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