Yeah, I'm struggling to believe that Anandtech just formally recommended a $500 consumer motherboard.
I know that the classic response will be, "well it's just a recommendation for those that want to spend that much money." But the problem is that the recommendation didn't say that in fine print. Those kinds of reasonable caveats don't make it on the "Anandtech recommended!" stickers that get put on the motherboard boxes.
No one needs a Ferrari or Bugatti. They're way overpriced for a car. But they are exemplar fetes of engineering. Believe it or not, there's people whom it doesn't matter whether they pay $20k or $2M for a car - it's a drop in the pan for them.
That's part of the problem with Anandtech (and review sites in general). The guy that does the MB reviews usually isn't the guy who does the GPU reviews, so he won't have access to the equipment to do those kind of tests.
And also to be fair ... Gigagabyte should provide 4 matching gpu's to do a proper review of these types of boards. I mean, it's their product on display right? It's not like they don't have any gpu's laying around.
Because this isn't a review, it's a paid for product advertisement as the majority of AT 'reviews' have been for the last 5 years. Look at the text it looks copy and pasted, then modified from product brochures.
So here we have a $500 motherboard with a 'recommended' rating, right before christmas.
Really.
Hey Anandtech, Does the quad SLI even work? Are you sure??
How in gods name, within one week, does AT post two HEADLINES about ultra high end features for high flagship tech products, yet fail to even test them, at all.
Cuz it's all about the $$$ Yo, and AT is officially rotten from the core.
You are 100% right. The board is clearly inferior for the price. It shouldnt be recommended. They didnt review the most BENEFICIAL part of the board which is the 4 GPU option. What a fail.
It's just gotten so obvious. In a good way, at least we see the money behind the certain, but sadly I miss the old AT articles that weren't designed like a QVC broadcast.
As soon as I read about the very poor support for fan control, I stopped. I want my pc as silent as possible and don't understand why they don't offer better fan control.
"But what if money was not an object? Several M.2 ports, extra SATA ports, add in a few USB 3.1, M.2 or Ethernet implementations, or go whacky with some RAID controllers? "
C'mon AsRock, there's your challenge, still room for some 10G :D
Yeah, that sort of archaic fan control is an instant disqualification, and I wouldn't recommend a motherboard with it. Maybe if I were shaving pennies to try and make a build work, and the cheapest motherboard available by a good margin had it, but otherwise I'd consider it as big a problem as missing a key feature that I can't get by expansion card.
So ~$500.00 gets you a high end gaming motherboard with crap fan support. Typically gamers push their systems which means thermal load = HEAT. This motherboard screams DO NOT BUY to any gamer.
Fancy fan speed controllers are about reducing noise when it's not needed. It won't make an equivalent fan setup faster. If heat is a problem, a dumb fan speed controller can still max it out.
Stopped caring at "Killer NIC". Why discard a perfectly good Intel NIC for this "gamer" garbage? There is no reason for an Intel based motherboard that's not aiming for utter cheapness to use anything else.
This is ridiculously overpriced. There are X99 boards with quad SLI/CF support that cost less. Extras like multiple NICs, USB 3.1, and better sound can be added to cheaper boards (via expansion cards or USB, in the case of sound/networking).
If your motherboard costs more than the CPU you're putting into it, and as much as a high end graphics card, you're doing it wrong.
EDIT: I should clarify, I agree this is too expensive, but there are use cases (mainly with compute and servers) where it can be legitimate to have the motherboard cost more than the CPU
A motherboard should cost more than the CPU. It has waaay more materials, Chips, Wifi, Controllers, Metal, Copper, Fiberglass, Connectors, Software, Cables, Features etc..,
han a simple CPU made with .0005 gram of gold and even less copper. Mostly sand and aluminum.
thank intel for their 60% profit margin, where-as these boards have 20-30% margins
So no test of the most important feature, the quad SLI support? Running two GPUs in x8/x8 tends to work well but what happens when you kick in a third or fourth so you end up with x8/x8/x8/x8 that is multiplexed into a single x16? The PCIe bandwidth can be limited at x8/x8, how does the multiplexer perform?
Agreed. The main reason to consider this thing is the x4 SLI. Too bad we have no idea what that looks like. Everything coming out of the review can be had for less on many other boards.
it's running a rev1 bios, and i'm not sure which performance your talking about.. All the benchmarks have it within 1 FPS, and that just boils down to variance. that's not even a 2% difference. DPC Latency is confirmed to be a intel wireless chipset and DRIVER problem, thus any board WITHOUT intel wireless doesnt have the DPC issues.
Ok, the board may be able to run a dual, triple, or quad SLI. However there isn't a skylake processor out with enough lanes to run that setup. The i7-6700k only has 16 lanes. At best, you can run a single GPU at full 16 lanes. Or dual with 8x and 8x. My personal setup on the board is a GTX 980 Ti (8x) and an intel 750 nvme drive (4x), with room for either a m2 or another intel 750. I'm not sure why they started including dual nics on consumer boards, they provide 0 benefit unless you some how have a business class 1+Gb/s internet connection. Best you can do with dual nics is configure them for smb 3.0 multi-channel.... though you'll need either another windows 10, 8.1 or server 2012 on your lan correctly configured as well to use it. I'd rather they just put in a 10 Gb/s nic instead.
It's because of the PLX chip that comes with the card. It essentially extends the lanes available (& speeds) at the expense of cost & higher power consumption
This is why Anandtech is losing it's way. Where is the 4 SLI bit of the review. Who would buy a $500 mobo for a CPU costing $300. Advertorial pure and simple.
There are several other $500 Z170 Motherboards.. Asus's Maximus VIII Extreme for example.
This has a expensive PLX chip, so it can do 16x0x16x0x or 8x8x8x8x. just fine. The PLX adds a tiny bit of latency, but nothing game breaking or noticeable.
Yeah; the gist is that you shouldn't use a single GPU with this card ideally. Granted, if you have money to spend on this board knowing its feature set, you probably wanted to do at *least* 2-way SLI
Yeah, for the price you think they'd at least drop some decent NIC silicon on there. Not saying Killer doesn't work, but to me it's like having realtek or something.
In other reviews of this card, the Killer is actually an advantage unless previous generations/implementations. TweakTown & other sites that reviewed it said that it was responsible for the "fastest wifi results they've ever seen"
The ZRXi chip does not support DD Live or DTS Connect over the S/PDIF like the ZRX does, so if you think you're going to hook this up to your home theater, you're not.
Just from the headline, I wonder "What games today are worth running with quad SLI? With any SLI? With even a single $600 GPU card?". I can't think of one. Even the "best" are clunky console ports, and hardly worth the $250 (max) card it would take to power them. The "high end gaming" market has become a canard.
what Jeffery said I am impressed that some one able to make $8960 in one month on the computer . you could try this out.....>>>>>>>............. .earni8 dot ℭom
I am not sure why so many motherboards are including the Killer LAN for the networking. The split second I read that, this motherboard fell to a $0.00 price point. I hate and by hate, I mean HATE Killer LAN networking solutions. One of my X99 boards and an ASRock 990FX have Killer LAN and neither implementation performs worth a fudge. The Intel solution on my other X99 (R5E), M5A99FX Pro R2.0 (B3) and the Realtek on my P67 board are faster, easier to deal with and never disconnect from anything or experience failure to load, latency issue, etc., unless my ISP itself is having problems. Killer has pushed my patients past the limit more than once. I am beginning to consider anything with Killer involved and reference to gamer or gaming to be like the horrid quality TN panels pushed off on the gaming public. A lesser class of product. Give me an Intel NIC and leave me in my heaven. I load the drivers and they just work; never have to mess with them again!
first of all, u have enough lanes for quad sli because u have 16 lanes for the graphics card coming from the cpu and another 20 coming from the chipset via dmi. Makes atotal of 36lanes u could split up.
Whats normally not working out are multiplexing chips, if it splits up without errors u left with the performance decrease. So at quad sli u left with 4 lanes for everything else, m2ssds/usb3.0chips/killer nics etc etc
That brings us to the weak spot of this test. The only thing whats different from other boards is entirely not tested. Pls make this thing full with gpus and m2 ssds etc and test if this multiplexing works out. Should be possible tou to get 4 identical gpus, im sure gigabyte got some lying around. If not ask asus if they help u prove that the new gigabyte board is crap. Im sure u got 4 gtx 980ti tomorrow.
Keep in mind that this 500buck board loses every gaming benchmark against a 100buck asus board with one third the phases. Next joke is the connection of the vrm coolers for water. What is this a 6mm outer diameter pipe? Thx for leaving 10% of my waterflow. Make it 2mm next time. Is it prefilled or is it an empty "heat"pipe on aircooling?
Next problem is that a dual sli of 980ti's gets limited from a 5820 or 5930 sometimes. So how much ln2 do i need gigabyte for not bottlenecking a quad sli?
Total bs. And nobody should put together a 960 or whatever quad sli, not even a normal sli if its not really needed. The poor scaling(not a major thing at dual but at triple and quad) is a nightmare, then u got micro stuttering, driver issues and heat/space problems. If needed ahigh end card dual sli but everything else is wasted money. Wait till next year when pascal and polaris are coming. Even if the money doesnst care, i would rather go in the next pub and spend the 400bucks there than throwing it away like this
and it has also worse sound quality, boot time, usb3.1 performance and dpc latency. This must be a joke for 5 times the price. Also a joke is that at doesnt test the oc ability of this oc board.
and its recommended by anand so its the third joke in a row. Not tested properly and poor performance in combination with high power consumption gets u an recommended. omg
But the truth is, gigabyte dont uses the 36 lanes that are possibel, instead they are telling just sthg. as u can see in the link gigabyte brings to us the wonder of splitting up 16lanes into 4 times 8, get u some of that. So they leave the most of the 20 chipset lanes untouched but u only have troubles with ur gpus not the m2 ssds ;) http://techreport.com/review/29346/gigabyte-z170x-... some wild switching and multiplexing going on there. Buyers pls dont expect that this hell of a build will run fine anytime soon.
but no, m2 ssds already throttle even if no gpu is installed. gj gigabyte. the likes are: fan header amounts, lighted shield if its dimmable, better socket, full black pcb, dual bios and for a few upgradeable audio. Next time f.e. better make the wlan module socketed to a chinch or coaxial spdif interface card instead of a second killer nic and put 2 vrm coolers in the box. both together doesnt work out very well. or just 3 adjustable 40-60mm fans side by side angled upwards pulling to the rear fan of manycases. then just half the phases all on left side connected with good tim and there u go with ur better thermal solution. Then customer can remove the fan package and screw on an adapter for water cooling if needed. fins go over to passive mode. Or let the chassis intrusion switch switch on some white leds on the mobo for checkups. Just in case someone of gb reads this and u guys wanted to do 3 killer nics on next mobo just ask us what would be nice, im sure u get plenty of ideas from there.
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wperry - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Stopped reading at the first sentence. I'm sure it's snazzy and all, but no.ImSpartacus - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
Yeah, I'm struggling to believe that Anandtech just formally recommended a $500 consumer motherboard.I know that the classic response will be, "well it's just a recommendation for those that want to spend that much money." But the problem is that the recommendation didn't say that in fine print. Those kinds of reasonable caveats don't make it on the "Anandtech recommended!" stickers that get put on the motherboard boxes.
It just seems weird.
samsonjs - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Who needs to be told that it might be out of their price range? I think that's something people can figure out themselves.JVC8bal - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
No one needs a Ferrari or Bugatti. They're way overpriced for a car. But they are exemplar fetes of engineering. Believe it or not, there's people whom it doesn't matter whether they pay $20k or $2M for a car - it's a drop in the pan for them.Chad - Sunday, January 3, 2016 - link
Meh... just get the Gigabyte GA-Z170X-UD5 TH instead... almost all of the features at less than half the price.Zak - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
Hey, but it's got three Krap NICs!Mikemk - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Looks awesome. The black DIMMs sortof strand out though, they should be wire.nathanddrews - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Which page tests the quad-SLI feature? I can't find it.DigitalFreak - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
That's part of the problem with Anandtech (and review sites in general). The guy that does the MB reviews usually isn't the guy who does the GPU reviews, so he won't have access to the equipment to do those kind of tests.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
And to be fair I don't even have 4 matching cards for quad-SLI. It's a very rare setup.kmi187 - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
And also to be fair ... Gigagabyte should provide 4 matching gpu's to do a proper review of these types of boards. I mean, it's their product on display right? It's not like they don't have any gpu's laying around.dsumanik - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
Because this isn't a review, it's a paid for product advertisement as the majority of AT 'reviews' have been for the last 5 years. Look at the text it looks copy and pasted, then modified from product brochures.So here we have a $500 motherboard with a 'recommended' rating, right before christmas.
Really.
Hey Anandtech, Does the quad SLI even work? Are you sure??
How in gods name, within one week, does AT post two HEADLINES about ultra high end features for high flagship tech products, yet fail to even test them, at all.
Cuz it's all about the $$$ Yo, and AT is officially rotten from the core.
WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
You are 100% right. The board is clearly inferior for the price. It shouldnt be recommended. They didnt review the most BENEFICIAL part of the board which is the 4 GPU option. What a fail.tim851 - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
Agreed.Rage187 - Monday, December 7, 2015 - link
It's just gotten so obvious. In a good way, at least we see the money behind the certain, but sadly I miss the old AT articles that weren't designed like a QVC broadcast.shabby - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Just like the triple m2 ssd's in raid article, no ssd's in raid to be found.happyfirst - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
As soon as I read about the very poor support for fan control, I stopped. I want my pc as silent as possible and don't understand why they don't offer better fan control.timbotim - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
"But what if money was not an object? Several M.2 ports, extra SATA ports, add in a few USB 3.1, M.2 or Ethernet implementations, or go whacky with some RAID controllers? "C'mon AsRock, there's your challenge, still room for some 10G :D
xthetenth - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Yeah, that sort of archaic fan control is an instant disqualification, and I wouldn't recommend a motherboard with it. Maybe if I were shaving pennies to try and make a build work, and the cheapest motherboard available by a good margin had it, but otherwise I'd consider it as big a problem as missing a key feature that I can't get by expansion card.xthetenth - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
As an addendum, having actual proper support in the OS level app makes it merely a bit of a problem, but why can't they implement the feature in EFI?zeeBomb - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
WowBatmeat - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
So ~$500.00 gets you a high end gaming motherboard with crap fan support. Typically gamers push their systems which means thermal load = HEAT. This motherboard screams DO NOT BUY to any gamer.Gigaplex - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Fancy fan speed controllers are about reducing noise when it's not needed. It won't make an equivalent fan setup faster. If heat is a problem, a dumb fan speed controller can still max it out.wolrah - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Stopped caring at "Killer NIC". Why discard a perfectly good Intel NIC for this "gamer" garbage? There is no reason for an Intel based motherboard that's not aiming for utter cheapness to use anything else.DigitalFreak - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
The people who buy this type of board usually have more money than sense. Intel sounds "meh" while "Killer" sounds awesome, so it must be better!Notmyusualid - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
No need to 'hate on' the Killer devices. Been there, done that.Simply find the correct Atheros / Qualcomm driver for it, and all will absolutely fine.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
The name is idiotic, just like Intel putting skulls on its ssds.etamin - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
stopped reading at Killer as well.chlamchowder - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
This is ridiculously overpriced. There are X99 boards with quad SLI/CF support that cost less. Extras like multiple NICs, USB 3.1, and better sound can be added to cheaper boards (via expansion cards or USB, in the case of sound/networking).If your motherboard costs more than the CPU you're putting into it, and as much as a high end graphics card, you're doing it wrong.
Brandenburgh_Man - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
I agree. When the mobo costs more than the CPU, you're doing it wrong. Also, for $500 I want 10Gbit Ethernet.WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
Bingo.Mikemk - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
What about a 5820k in an ASUS X99-E WS?Mikemk - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
EDIT: I should clarify, I agree this is too expensive, but there are use cases (mainly with compute and servers) where it can be legitimate to have the motherboard cost more than the CPURaistlinZ - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Wouldn't someone buying a workstation mobo want a Xenon CPU, not a consumer grade CPU?Mikemk - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Well, if they just want GPU power with 7 GPUs, and doesn't care about CPU performance, the 5820k is relatively cheap way to get the system to bootGigaplex - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
The 5820k has cut down PCIe lanes. You'd want the next model up for that many GPUs.bizude - Monday, December 14, 2015 - link
You could run a 3-way setup on a 5820k using 3.0x8/3.0x8/3.0x8 - just not a 4-way.jasonelmore - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
A motherboard should cost more than the CPU. It has waaay more materials, Chips, Wifi, Controllers, Metal, Copper, Fiberglass, Connectors, Software, Cables, Features etc..,han a simple CPU made with .0005 gram of gold and even less copper. Mostly sand and aluminum.
thank intel for their 60% profit margin, where-as these boards have 20-30% margins
Zotamedu - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
So no test of the most important feature, the quad SLI support? Running two GPUs in x8/x8 tends to work well but what happens when you kick in a third or fourth so you end up with x8/x8/x8/x8 that is multiplexed into a single x16? The PCIe bandwidth can be limited at x8/x8, how does the multiplexer perform?jasonelmore - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
yeah i know right, he even states he has 4 290x's in his test setup.. didnt even run the test on it.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link
I have four 290X cards? wow, where?I have the 4GB model, not four of them.
sor - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
Agreed. The main reason to consider this thing is the x4 SLI. Too bad we have no idea what that looks like. Everything coming out of the review can be had for less on many other boards.jasonelmore - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Amazing looking board with the most I/O i have ever seen on a mainstream chipset.This would look sick with white tubing, in a corsair white case.
WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
Who fucking cares how it looks when the performance is subpar for the price?! What are you, an artist?!jasonelmore - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
it's running a rev1 bios, and i'm not sure which performance your talking about.. All the benchmarks have it within 1 FPS, and that just boils down to variance. that's not even a 2% difference. DPC Latency is confirmed to be a intel wireless chipset and DRIVER problem, thus any board WITHOUT intel wireless doesnt have the DPC issues.linster - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Those "Quick Links to Other Pages" on page one don't work.TheEvilEngineer - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Ok, the board may be able to run a dual, triple, or quad SLI. However there isn't a skylake processor out with enough lanes to run that setup. The i7-6700k only has 16 lanes. At best, you can run a single GPU at full 16 lanes. Or dual with 8x and 8x. My personal setup on the board is a GTX 980 Ti (8x) and an intel 750 nvme drive (4x), with room for either a m2 or another intel 750. I'm not sure why they started including dual nics on consumer boards, they provide 0 benefit unless you some how have a business class 1+Gb/s internet connection. Best you can do with dual nics is configure them for smb 3.0 multi-channel.... though you'll need either another windows 10, 8.1 or server 2012 on your lan correctly configured as well to use it. I'd rather they just put in a 10 Gb/s nic instead.lilkwarrior - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
It's because of the PLX chip that comes with the card. It essentially extends the lanes available (& speeds) at the expense of cost & higher power consumptionJackie60 - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
This is why Anandtech is losing it's way. Where is the 4 SLI bit of the review. Who would buy a $500 mobo for a CPU costing $300. Advertorial pure and simple.jasonelmore - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
There are several other $500 Z170 Motherboards.. Asus's Maximus VIII Extreme for example.This has a expensive PLX chip, so it can do 16x0x16x0x or 8x8x8x8x. just fine. The PLX adds a tiny bit of latency, but nothing game breaking or noticeable.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
"The PLX adds a tiny bit of latency, but nothing game breaking or noticeable."That would be what a review would show.
lilkwarrior - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Yeah; the gist is that you shouldn't use a single GPU with this card ideally. Granted, if you have money to spend on this board knowing its feature set, you probably wanted to do at *least* 2-way SLIKlug4Pres - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
Agree with those saying this is just ridiculous advertorial. Come on Anandtech reviewers, where is your self-respect?surft - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
Killer NICs? Those have their share of problems. Dissapointed that they couldn't have provided at least one Intel one.sor - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Yeah, for the price you think they'd at least drop some decent NIC silicon on there. Not saying Killer doesn't work, but to me it's like having realtek or something.lilkwarrior - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
In other reviews of this card, the Killer is actually an advantage unless previous generations/implementations. TweakTown & other sites that reviewed it said that it was responsible for the "fastest wifi results they've ever seen"benzosaurus - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
"The graphical BIOS (or UEFI/EFI, we use BIOS for clarity)"Isn't using the wrong words to refer to a thing, like, literally the opposite of what "clarity" means?
JVC8bal - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
The ZRXi chip does not support DD Live or DTS Connect over the S/PDIF like the ZRX does, so if you think you're going to hook this up to your home theater, you're not.Arbie - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Just from the headline, I wonder "What games today are worth running with quad SLI? With any SLI? With even a single $600 GPU card?". I can't think of one. Even the "best" are clunky console ports, and hardly worth the $250 (max) card it would take to power them. The "high end gaming" market has become a canard.juliabrown943 - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
what Jeffery said I am impressed that some one able to make $8960 in one month on the computer . you could try this out.....>>>>>>>............. .earni8 dot ℭomQuestor - Monday, December 28, 2015 - link
I am not sure why so many motherboards are including the Killer LAN for the networking. The split second I read that, this motherboard fell to a $0.00 price point. I hate and by hate, I mean HATE Killer LAN networking solutions. One of my X99 boards and an ASRock 990FX have Killer LAN and neither implementation performs worth a fudge. The Intel solution on my other X99 (R5E), M5A99FX Pro R2.0 (B3) and the Realtek on my P67 board are faster, easier to deal with and never disconnect from anything or experience failure to load, latency issue, etc., unless my ISP itself is having problems. Killer has pushed my patients past the limit more than once. I am beginning to consider anything with Killer involved and reference to gamer or gaming to be like the horrid quality TN panels pushed off on the gaming public. A lesser class of product. Give me an Intel NIC and leave me in my heaven. I load the drivers and they just work; never have to mess with them again!__187__ - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
first of all, u have enough lanes for quad sli because u have 16 lanes for the graphics card coming from the cpu and another 20 coming from the chipset via dmi. Makes atotal of 36lanes u could split up.Whats normally not working out are multiplexing chips, if it splits up without errors u left with the performance decrease. So at quad sli u left with 4 lanes for everything else, m2ssds/usb3.0chips/killer nics etc etc
That brings us to the weak spot of this test. The only thing whats different from other boards is entirely not tested. Pls make this thing full with gpus and m2 ssds etc and test if this multiplexing works out. Should be possible tou to get 4 identical gpus, im sure gigabyte got some lying around. If not ask asus if they help u prove that the new gigabyte board is crap. Im sure u got 4 gtx 980ti tomorrow.
Keep in mind that this 500buck board loses every gaming benchmark against a 100buck asus board with one third the phases.
Next joke is the connection of the vrm coolers for water. What is this a 6mm outer diameter pipe? Thx for leaving 10% of my waterflow. Make it 2mm next time.
Is it prefilled or is it an empty "heat"pipe on aircooling?
Next problem is that a dual sli of 980ti's gets limited from a 5820 or 5930 sometimes.
So how much ln2 do i need gigabyte for not bottlenecking a quad sli?
Total bs. And nobody should put together a 960 or whatever quad sli, not even a normal sli if its not really needed. The poor scaling(not a major thing at dual but at triple and quad) is a nightmare, then u got micro stuttering, driver issues and heat/space problems.
If needed ahigh end card dual sli but everything else is wasted money. Wait till next year when pascal and polaris are coming.
Even if the money doesnst care, i would rather go in the next pub and spend the 400bucks there than throwing it away like this
__187__ - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
and it has also worse sound quality, boot time, usb3.1 performance and dpc latency.This must be a joke for 5 times the price.
Also a joke is that at doesnt test the oc ability of this oc board.
__187__ - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
and its recommended by anand so its the third joke in a row.Not tested properly and poor performance in combination with high power consumption gets u an recommended. omg
__187__ - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
But the truth is, gigabyte dont uses the 36 lanes that are possibel, instead they are telling just sthg. as u can see in the link gigabyte brings to us the wonder of splitting up 16lanes into 4 times 8, get u some of that. So they leave the most of the 20 chipset lanes untouched but u only have troubles with ur gpus not the m2 ssds ;)http://techreport.com/review/29346/gigabyte-z170x-...
some wild switching and multiplexing going on there.
Buyers pls dont expect that this hell of a build will run fine anytime soon.
__187__ - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
instead of that ur m2 ssds will throttle because they are crammed(not sure if its the right word) under the gpus, lol__187__ - Wednesday, January 6, 2016 - link
but no, m2 ssds already throttle even if no gpu is installed. gj gigabyte.the likes are: fan header amounts, lighted shield if its dimmable, better socket, full black pcb, dual bios and for a few upgradeable audio.
Next time f.e. better make the wlan module socketed to a chinch or coaxial spdif interface card instead of a second killer nic and put 2 vrm coolers in the box. both together doesnt work out very
well. or just 3 adjustable 40-60mm fans side by side angled upwards pulling to the rear fan of manycases. then just half the phases all on left side connected with good tim and there u go with ur better thermal solution. Then customer can remove the fan package and screw on an adapter for water cooling if needed. fins go over to passive mode. Or let the chassis intrusion switch switch on some white leds on the mobo for checkups.
Just in case someone of gb reads this and u guys wanted to do 3 killer nics on next mobo just ask us what would be nice, im sure u get plenty of ideas from there.