The only reason I invested in flagship enthusiast bait was to bet on the components being built to last and stand up to harsh worst case scenarios. Considering they were built to handle punishment under ln2 extremes.
But they usually went on sale fairly quickly after the initial release. ( the rampage extreme III I am still sitting on I bought for well under $400 in about 3 months after release ) I assume those days are over? Which is a shame considering the punishing volt experiementation and water accidents I have had... Hedging my bets on the expensive caps and mosfets have seemingly bought me longevity to wait out this incremental expensive hell!
In the interim on client builds... I been getting the mil spec bait instead.
A comparison between the mil spec branded stuff between gigabyte and asus would be interesting as well as an honest exploration whether as much is actually of a grade that might guarantee longevity/abuse? Or manufacturer ad nauseam abuse that offers no value compared to server grade branded stuff? ( asus prime ).
Is there a mil spec ansi standard that is legally meaningful?
The relative cheap price compared to the gaming flagship bait seems reasonable.
But I am not even sure about server grade claims? Compared to say... The expense of Super Micro?
I close my eyes n just buy the cheapest "tuf" branded boards n cross my fingers.
I can't comment about these two boards specifically, but I've used the Gaming K7 and Maximus IX Hero, and while I feel Gigabyte tends to be more generous in features, as someone who overclocks, I really need the Adaptive voltage setting that's missing from GIgabyte boards.
"The default boot time of both the Asus Prime Z270-A and the GIGABYTE Z270X-Ultra Gaming is very good, with 12.6 seconds for the former and 13.4 seconds for the latter" something is wrong with the graph for that because thats not at all what is shown. it seems to have the default and stripped reversed. the other 2 points of comparison show default on top, stripped under.
While there is certainly a proliferation of longer names, I feel these motherboard names are not excessively long. Sure, they could be shorter, but I feel that it doesn't give off an "Ultra gaming tactical pro sli ftw thor odin lightning edition" vibe
I wish Intel would streamline their chipset for speed
I remember how a 1st gen ATOM motherboard with IDE/serial and parallel ports and 2GB Max Ram booted several seconds faster than the 2nd Gen ATOM with 4GB Ram due to the chipset features
Faster CPU's require faster chipsets streamlined for speed freaks!
A stock install of Windows XP on a sammy 840 or 850 Pro boots in 3 seconds on a 35 Watt dualcore Sandy Bridge A stock install of Windows 10 takes alsmost 10 seconds longer to boot on the same system
disregarding the O.S., chipset features and BIOS should advance with the CPU to match the boot speeds of ancient systems
Why is no-one questioning what is actually limiting the boot speeds on newer systems?
I don't think you can "really" fix this with a different brand of motherboard
We can see that some brands do better than others, but I would think that a sammy 960 Pro booting Win 10 on a new 4+Ghz quadcore CPU could (or should) beat an ancient dualcore system at half the clockspeed in boot times
After all, Win 7 was optimized and advertised as booting faster than XP Win 8 was optimized and advertised as being faster than Win 7 and Windows Spyware Platform 10 was supposed to be faster than Windows 8.1
Yeah, at some indeterminate time after Windows 7 launch, it seems boot times have gone down the drain. Kinda funky how the best boot times I ever had on a PC was with a first generation SSD on SATA II, but today, with an MLC-based PCI-e M.2 SSD that's supposed to be orders of magnitude faster... is actually slower when booting.
I never cared too much to investigate, though. I tend to let my PCs sleep overnight rather than full shut downs, and waking from sleep has been pretty quick still.
Doesn't XP only need about 150MB in Ram on a clean boot? Compared to... Like 2GB in Win10. I guess all the new hardware power keeps us out of 3.5 minute boot times.
I agree. I have an old Gigabyte sandy bridge mini itx motherboard that takes just a few seconds to boot, even with windows 10. Not sure what is going on here, unless the motherboards are doing more checks.
I am actually a bit disappointed in my Prime Z270-A. I have been using it for several months. When trying the XMP profile, the board will not POST. When adjusting certain settings in the BIOS, it doesn't recognize something has changed and won't change the settings. There are other nitpicks around, like it sometimes comes out of sleep and seems to be "on" but nothing seems to be powered up. The GPU light is on, but no lights on anything else work. I have to hold power for 6 seconds and boot it back up. No idea what is happening with this.
This board might be my last ASUS board after about 6 in a row.
I own the same Mobo. No issue at all with XMP (Corsair Vengeance LED 16GB 2X8GB : supported by Asus). No issue either with sleep with current drivers in Win 10. Flawless. Left Gigabyte (Z97) with their subpar UEFI bios. Moreover the is minimal support with SpeedFan because the data sheet for the integrated fan controler is not public.
You are having better luck than I then. My memory is also Corsair Vengeance (2x16GB) CMU32GX4M2C3000C15B. I have read that to run XMP you may need to overclock your processor, but this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. No other computers I have encounter the same issue.
XMP profile, while meant to be a nice easy solution can be a hit or miss for any motherboard/ ram combo. Just enter in timings manually. May have to set system agent voltage and io voltage anywhere from 1.15- 1.25.
I used this Gigabyte board in my desktop built early this year. After building a Asus 170-series based computer for my brother I decided to avoid them (also had no USB2 back panel ports and some weird issue installing windows from USB) and stick to Gigabyte which served me very well on my prior desktop.
I chose this particular model because it has Intel Ethernet (vs Killer primarily) and the U.2 port for some amount of future proofing if that standard ever takes off before I build the next one. I didn't realize the power delivery was so short on phases, but I don't exactly overclock at all, so hopefully its not an issue. Yes, they have the SATA-Express as well, but I'm beginning to wonder if that'll ever go anywhere.
Something that wasn't mentioned is that the 2 yellow USB 3 ports are their DAC-UP ports with some sort of special isolated power/low noise delivery system.
"The GIGABYTE Z270X Ultra Gaming features a native U.2 PCIe ×4 connector and SATA Express ports: both of which are storage interfaces that we rarely see implemented on sub-$170 motherboards that are targeted towards gamers."
These ports are such a waste, especially SATA Express. 0 devices support that and 1 aging SSD supports U.2.
Not related to the boards but anyone else notice how each picture of both boards is taken from EXACTLY the same perspective/angle? How is that even possible? Are you a robot or something?
the secret is putting your camera on tripod and placing products in the same angle,super simple. And to crop it if needed in Photoshop to make it look similar :)
Does it really matter if a system boots in 3 seconds or 15 seconds? Booting a system isn't where you spend most of your time. -------------------------------------------------------------- Does it really matter if a Billion PC's take 15 seconds to boot?
It would if each of them reboots every day!
That would be over 4 million hours of waste energy DAILY!
The wasted energy in one day is equivalent of running one PC for 475 years
I guess you guys don't remember the days of 2min+ boots, to me a 20s boot feels very fast. I do care about reboot time for those instances where I am in a game and the PC crashes - too long and you can't rejoin.
There's something called fast boot to bypass unnecessary tests. I use that on my AMD mobos, I only see the mobo logo, AHCI page and straight to windows load.
TBH, it seems that unless you're looking to do some hardcore overclocking on the cheap, Gigabyte's board is the clear winner here in terms of features.
This would have been an interesting review in... January, 6 months ago. Now it's a dead-end platform, everybody's waiting for Z370 late this year and Z390 early next year. Not to mention X299 and X399 mobo reviews.
Seeing how bad the x299 rollout is, I think you'll be waiting a lot longer than that for Z370, so this is very relevant for people that don't sit around and wait for the next best thing.
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A5 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
A good comparison review of products that people will actually buy instead of the $500 monstrosities we normally see. Thanks.theuglyman0war - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
The only reason I invested in flagship enthusiast bait was to bet on the components being built to last and stand up to harsh worst case scenarios.Considering they were built to handle punishment under ln2 extremes.
But they usually went on sale fairly quickly after the initial release. ( the rampage extreme III I am still sitting on I bought for well under $400 in about 3 months after release )
I assume those days are over?
Which is a shame considering the punishing volt experiementation and water accidents I have had...
Hedging my bets on the expensive caps and mosfets have seemingly bought me longevity to wait out this incremental expensive hell!
In the interim on client builds...
I been getting the mil spec bait instead.
A comparison between the mil spec branded stuff between gigabyte and asus would be interesting as well as an honest exploration whether as much is actually of a grade that might guarantee longevity/abuse? Or manufacturer ad nauseam abuse that offers no value compared to server grade branded stuff? ( asus prime ).
Is there a mil spec ansi standard that is legally meaningful?
The relative cheap price compared to the gaming flagship bait seems reasonable.
But I am not even sure about server grade claims? Compared to say...
The expense of Super Micro?
I close my eyes n just buy the cheapest "tuf" branded boards n cross my fingers.
OddFriendship8989 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
I can't comment about these two boards specifically, but I've used the Gaming K7 and Maximus IX Hero, and while I feel Gigabyte tends to be more generous in features, as someone who overclocks, I really need the Adaptive voltage setting that's missing from GIgabyte boards.RiZad - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
"The default boot time of both the Asus Prime Z270-A and the GIGABYTE Z270X-Ultra Gaming is very good, with 12.6 seconds for the former and 13.4 seconds for the latter" something is wrong with the graph for that because thats not at all what is shown. it seems to have the default and stripped reversed. the other 2 points of comparison show default on top, stripped under.jbrl - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Would have really liked to see a comparison to a 170 board with the updated bios. Otherwise, why should I drop a few hundred extra on a new board?A5 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
If you're already on a Z170 board there is no reason to upgrade.jbrl - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Thanks, that is what I was thinking. I guess they can't put that in the review because asus will stop sending them samples.shabby - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Ultra gaming tactical pro sli ftw edition... this is getting a bit absurd.MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
While there is certainly a proliferation of longer names, I feel these motherboard names are not excessively long. Sure, they could be shorter, but I feel that it doesn't give off an "Ultra gaming tactical pro sli ftw thor odin lightning edition" vibeBullwinkle J Moose - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Boot Times look Horrible!I wish Intel would streamline their chipset for speed
I remember how a 1st gen ATOM motherboard with IDE/serial and parallel ports and 2GB Max Ram booted several seconds faster than the 2nd Gen ATOM with 4GB Ram due to the chipset features
Faster CPU's require faster chipsets streamlined for speed freaks!
A stock install of Windows XP on a sammy 840 or 850 Pro boots in 3 seconds on a 35 Watt dualcore Sandy Bridge
A stock install of Windows 10 takes alsmost 10 seconds longer to boot on the same system
disregarding the O.S., chipset features and BIOS should advance with the CPU to match the boot speeds of ancient systems
Why is no-one questioning what is actually limiting the boot speeds on newer systems?
I don't think you can "really" fix this with a different brand of motherboard
We can see that some brands do better than others, but I would think that a sammy 960 Pro booting Win 10 on a new 4+Ghz quadcore CPU could (or should) beat an ancient dualcore system at half the clockspeed in boot times
After all, Win 7 was optimized and advertised as booting faster than XP
Win 8 was optimized and advertised as being faster than Win 7
and Windows Spyware Platform 10 was supposed to be faster than Windows 8.1
What gives?
This is DEFINITELY not fake news!
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Yeah, at some indeterminate time after Windows 7 launch, it seems boot times have gone down the drain. Kinda funky how the best boot times I ever had on a PC was with a first generation SSD on SATA II, but today, with an MLC-based PCI-e M.2 SSD that's supposed to be orders of magnitude faster... is actually slower when booting.I never cared too much to investigate, though. I tend to let my PCs sleep overnight rather than full shut downs, and waking from sleep has been pretty quick still.
Rocket321 - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
Doesn't XP only need about 150MB in Ram on a clean boot? Compared to... Like 2GB in Win10. I guess all the new hardware power keeps us out of 3.5 minute boot times.StevoLincolnite - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
Does it really matter if a system boots in 3 seconds or 15 seconds? Booting a system isn't where you spend most of your time.Dug - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
I agree. I have an old Gigabyte sandy bridge mini itx motherboard that takes just a few seconds to boot, even with windows 10.Not sure what is going on here, unless the motherboards are doing more checks.
SeeManRun - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
I am actually a bit disappointed in my Prime Z270-A. I have been using it for several months. When trying the XMP profile, the board will not POST. When adjusting certain settings in the BIOS, it doesn't recognize something has changed and won't change the settings. There are other nitpicks around, like it sometimes comes out of sleep and seems to be "on" but nothing seems to be powered up. The GPU light is on, but no lights on anything else work. I have to hold power for 6 seconds and boot it back up. No idea what is happening with this.This board might be my last ASUS board after about 6 in a row.
blurp - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
I own the same Mobo. No issue at all with XMP (Corsair Vengeance LED 16GB 2X8GB : supported by Asus). No issue either with sleep with current drivers in Win 10. Flawless. Left Gigabyte (Z97) with their subpar UEFI bios. Moreover the is minimal support with SpeedFan because the data sheet for the integrated fan controler is not public.SeeManRun - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
You are having better luck than I then. My memory is also Corsair Vengeance (2x16GB) CMU32GX4M2C3000C15B. I have read that to run XMP you may need to overclock your processor, but this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. No other computers I have encounter the same issue.Dug - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
XMP profile, while meant to be a nice easy solution can be a hit or miss for any motherboard/ ram combo.Just enter in timings manually. May have to set system agent voltage and io voltage anywhere from 1.15- 1.25.
e1jones - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
I used this Gigabyte board in my desktop built early this year. After building a Asus 170-series based computer for my brother I decided to avoid them (also had no USB2 back panel ports and some weird issue installing windows from USB) and stick to Gigabyte which served me very well on my prior desktop.I chose this particular model because it has Intel Ethernet (vs Killer primarily) and the U.2 port for some amount of future proofing if that standard ever takes off before I build the next one. I didn't realize the power delivery was so short on phases, but I don't exactly overclock at all, so hopefully its not an issue. Yes, they have the SATA-Express as well, but I'm beginning to wonder if that'll ever go anywhere.
Something that wasn't mentioned is that the 2 yellow USB 3 ports are their DAC-UP ports with some sort of special isolated power/low noise delivery system.
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
"The GIGABYTE Z270X Ultra Gaming features a native U.2 PCIe ×4 connector and SATA Express ports: both of which are storage interfaces that we rarely see implemented on sub-$170 motherboards that are targeted towards gamers."These ports are such a waste, especially SATA Express. 0 devices support that and 1 aging SSD supports U.2.
Edgar Saint - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
Not related to the boards but anyone else notice how each picture of both boards is taken from EXACTLY the same perspective/angle? How is that even possible? Are you a robot or something?milkod2001 - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
the secret is putting your camera on tripod and placing products in the same angle,super simple.And to crop it if needed in Photoshop to make it look similar :)
E.Fyll - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
Illuminati confirmed.Bullwinkle J Moose - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
Stevo asks....Does it really matter if a system boots in 3 seconds or 15 seconds? Booting a system isn't where you spend most of your time.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Does it really matter if a Billion PC's take 15 seconds to boot?
It would if each of them reboots every day!
That would be over 4 million hours of waste energy DAILY!
The wasted energy in one day is equivalent of running one PC for 475 years
so, ummmmm, yeah?
Bullwinkle J Moose - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
But Mr Moose, a Billion PC's rebooting daily seems a bit high because some systems stay on for a year or more!Yes, but some people reboot 3 / 5 / 10 or 20 times a day in which case a Billion would seem quite low
Icehawk - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
I guess you guys don't remember the days of 2min+ boots, to me a 20s boot feels very fast. I do care about reboot time for those instances where I am in a game and the PC crashes - too long and you can't rejoin.lucam - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
When are you guys going to review the new IPad Pro?Lolimaster - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
Why would you want an obsolete platform?Ryzen 5 1500X 4c/8t is 95% of the i7 7700 at 1440p gaming + 1080ti for half price, whats the point of z270?
silverblue - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
On that note, a Ryzen motherboard review or two could help with future purchasing decisions... :)Lolimaster - Wednesday, July 19, 2017 - link
There's something called fast boot to bypass unnecessary tests. I use that on my AMD mobos, I only see the mobo logo, AHCI page and straight to windows load.The_Assimilator - Thursday, July 20, 2017 - link
TBH, it seems that unless you're looking to do some hardcore overclocking on the cheap, Gigabyte's board is the clear winner here in terms of features.halcyon - Friday, July 21, 2017 - link
This would have been an interesting review in... January, 6 months ago. Now it's a dead-end platform, everybody's waiting for Z370 late this year and Z390 early next year. Not to mention X299 and X399 mobo reviews.Dug - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Seeing how bad the x299 rollout is, I think you'll be waiting a lot longer than that for Z370, so this is very relevant for people that don't sit around and wait for the next best thing.malireddyk - Monday, September 18, 2017 - link
Doh!