Intel Skylake Z170 Motherboards: A Quick Look at 55+ New Products
by Ian Cutress on August 5, 2015 7:59 AM ESTASRock Z170: Mini-ATX and Micro-ITX
ASRock Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac
Everyone loves a mini-ITX gaming motherboard, right? Even if it says Fatal1ty?
Mini-ITX boards are notorious for getting things right, but ASRock has had a go with this one to implement a number of features. Top of the list is probably USB 3.1, where we have both Type-C and Type-A ports on the rear panel. The rear panel also shows an 802.11ac 2T2R dual band WiFi connection, dual HDMI ports and a single DisplayPort. Other networking is from the Intel I219V, while the half-width audio block comes from the higher end ALC1150 codec. My specifications sheet says there is a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot on board, and by the looks of it we would probably find it on the rear as the half-sized mini-PCIe slot is occupied by the WiFi card. There is a total of six SATA 6 Gbps ports on board with a SATA Express as well, and we’re still in the realm of DDR4.
ASRock Z170M Pro4S ($100)
The Pro4S is designed to be the best cost/performance Z170 motherboard on the market, and the successor to the Z97M Anniversary – it does this by shedding a number of features. We are down to six-phase power with half-height heatsinks, a single PCIe 3.0 x16 from the chipset and no USB 3.1. We still get a PCIe 3.0 x4 based M.2 slot due to the number of free lanes from the chipset, but there are no SATA Express here and only six SATA 6 Gbps slots. Networking comes from the Intel I219-V codec while audio is still the ALC892 design. This board still aims for DDR4 it should be noted.
ASRock Z170M-ITX/ac
The solitary mini-ITX board from ASRock being announced publicly is the Z170M-ITX/AC. Not quite sure why they need an M in the name with the ITX being there, but it must be said the board isn’t necessarily built for style:
I’m sure that this board is more aligned with the Pro motherboards than the Extreme motherboards, namely due to the lack of USB 3.1, but it does oddly enough have dual network ports in the form of an Intel I219-V and the Realtek RTL8111E as well as an 802.11ac 2T2R dual band solution included, sitting upright in the mini-PCIe slot. Audio is provided by the ALC892 codec and a total of four SATA 6 Gbps ports are found just past the DDR4 memory slots. These ports are somewhat annoying, meaning that locking cables will easily block out the last cable from being removed without removing all others first. There is an mSATA slot on board as well, and it would seem to be on the rear similar to previous ASRock mini-ITX designs.
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8steve8 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
how about the 6700k CPUs in the USA?Luminair - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
FYI Asus has an alert on BBB for sending people broken products: http://www.bbb.org/greater-san-francisco/business-...Hundreds of complaints this year, including people with broken motherboard who did an RMA and received in return... a broken motherboard.
DanNeely - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Ugh. Are they only testing RMAs after getting them sent back twice? (Assuming the first time is user error, not a hardware fault?)apoclypse - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Wow. Remember when motherboards and computer components were ugly? Thos Asrock boards are a work of art. The same with the MSI boards. Not to impressed with what Asus has this time around (in-terms of looks). I've recently built a Haswell-E rig with the X99X from Asrock so I'm not really looking to buy anything but damn those boards make me regret not waiting. Ah well, I needed the extra cores anyway.NARC4457 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Am I the only one that is still ridiculously confused at the next generation of fast storage? m.2/nvMe what's bootable, what's not, what pinout (B/M)....What the hell is going on with these standards (sic)?
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
M.2 is a connection standard that can support both SATA and PCIe storage protocols. It is up to the manufacturer to decide which protocol to implement.SATA drives can use AHCI or IDE, while PCIe drives can be either AHCI or NVMe, but it depends on the controller if NVMe is supported.
Typically NVMe has to be enabled in the BIOS in order to boot from the drive, and you have to install the operating system in UEFI mode - basically Win8.1/10 does this already.
Most Z170 motherboards with M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 should be supporting NVMe devices as boot drives , although I would still refer to the motherboard manufacturers website to confirm this is the case, either on the motherboard's page or in the motherboard's downloadable manual.
Hope that helps.
NARC4457 - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Thanks Ian, that actually helps a lot.joex4444 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
As an owner of a PCIe 2.0 x8 RAID card, I'd love to see someone put out a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot controlled by the PCH that's actually x8. I see a lot of slots that are physically x16, with x8 connectors but the text always refers to them as PCIe 3.0 x4 (PCH). As I've 8 drives connected to that, I want the full x8 connection. Now of course using the second physical x16 slot on SLI boards and taking 8 lanes from the CPU ought to work, but that drops the GPU down to an x8 link; it would be great to use x16/x8 instead of x16/x4 or x8/x8 here (GPU/RAID).Z170 looked so promising, but so far only X99 offers the PCIe configuration described above.
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
The chipset essentially has five PCIe 3.0 x4 controllers, and you can't combine them into an x8. You could use a PCIe bridge chip like a PLX to convert 4 to 8, but you'll still be limited by the four lanes in into the chip. The only way you will get an 8-lane slot is from the processor, unfortunately (because then it would open up GPU possibilities).DanNeely - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Is there any reason other than market segmenting (protecting LGA2011's 40 CPU lanes) or avoiding a single device being able to max out the DMI link for them not to allow combos bigger than a 4x?