Pros: I have a white fractal case and a white fractal design newton psu. So this went very nice with it. price is okay. It works well with a m.2 ssd as your boot drive. I was able to clock it to 4.6 on my i5-6600k

Cons: The io shield is thin bendy flimsy and it will cut you like a knife if you do not watch out for it. The VRM heatsinks do not use screws and the pcb board is flexy bendy. The sound chip is the lower cost ALC 892

Overall Review: I have my own dac so the sound is not a big deal. Should I buy this is the question? I am a newegg exggpert reviewer so I got to give it a test run. Frankly I would go bigger then this ASUS and get the ASUS Maximus gene Viii. I have owned The maximus gene iv , v , vi , vii ,viii all were my favorite mATX mothers boards. You are entering higher price with the maximus but all of mine have worked really well. I will get back to this with a second review as I am giving it to a crazy gaming buddy that plays for hours on end. He will use a 390x on it and maybe a 980 ti. I used the older 290 and a hd7970 both were good.

Pros: I thought this was a very nice motherboard to work with thanks to it's clean layout and thoughtful inclusion of Q-Connector that made getting the front panel connectors a breeze to set up. I'm very happy to see that Asus is still including these. I did find the "CPU Installer Helper" thing it came with odd and didn't use it. The BIOS is very modern looking and the EZ Mode is a nice basic way to set up your boot priority and fan controls as well as keep tabs on the processor's temperature. I like that I'm prepared with this motherboard. It's a very forward thinking design with USB 3.1 as well as having both Type A and Type-C connectors. This is also the first board I've ever used that had two USB 3.0 Front-Panel headers. You don't need to have 4 USB port's in the front, you can always get a bracket for the back of your case. I love the aesthetics of this board, it matches perfectly with my NZXT Noctis 450 (White) and the blue lighting I have in my case reflects wonderfully off the shroud near the back. It's beautiful board. The biggest tentative plus I have for this board is the availability of an "Unofficial" BIOS that allows OCing of Non-K chips. Once Asus officially releases a BIOS for overclocking Non-K i3 and i5 chips the value of this board goes up ten-fold for me. This board is well priced, nicely featured and forward looking, so someone can start with an i3, squeeze some extra performance out of it for a while then upgrade to a 6700k down the road. All on the same Z170-A board. Seeing the Overclocks done with the i3-6100 (4.4Ghz) and i5-6500(4.5Ghz) done with Unofficial BIOS's have me very hopeful. Personally I'm waiting for an Official BIOS before I OC my i5-6500.

Cons: I don't personally have many cons with this board. I've had it for a while to make sure that I didn't come across the issues many of the other reviewers here have been having. So far it has been running very well and feel bad for those that have had a bad experience with this board, and will say that it is concerning to hear of those issues. The other issue I have with the board is the display in the BIOS appears to be set for 1024x768, which on a 1080p screen looks odd and a bit fuzzy.

Overall Review: I have to say that I was very pleased with this board and Skylake as well. This is a gorgeous motherboard to me, mainly because of how sharply this motherboard's design matches up to my Noctis 450 case, it's a good combination. Outside of look's I have to say I'm impressed with Skylake. Seeing the i5-6500 outperform my i5-4670k in games was very heartening to see. I'm excited to see a Non-K overclocking BIOS from Asus in the future, which would add just another notch of awesomeness to a very solid motherboard.

Pros: Tested with a Core i7-6700K, GTX 980 Ti, 4x4GB of DDR4-3000 RAM, and a Samsung 850 EVO M.2 drive. Easily OC'd the 6700K to 4.4GHz with a simple change of ratios, no need for extra voltage. In fact these Z170 boards (this is my second) are coming from the factory with pretty high default vcores (1.28V), and I undervolted the board by 0.1V to hit the overclock. Easily accepted my fast DDR4 kit, even four sticks of it (using 2N command rate). M.2 drive didn't work until switching a setting in the UEFI, as SATA lanes are shared between it and the SATA Express port. But Asus programmed in a helpful bootup warning about this.

Cons: Really not feature-rich for the price, and some obvious physical cost-cutting: (1) heatsinks are secured with spring-loaded pushpins. They move at the slightest touch, suggesting a weak contact (2) the back I/O panel is disgraceful on a board this expensive - it was nearly impossible to get the ports through it due to all the hanging metal - a padded panel like those included in other Asus boards around the same price would be a welcome addition. Asus knows how to do better. (3) the heatsinks are actually sharp, and I got a pretty serious cut on my thumb handling the board by the heatsinks while struggling with the I/O panel (4) no other board anywhere near this price relies on the cheap ALC892 audio codec (5) very limited number of USB ports (six), although one is a forward-looking 3.1/Type-C.

Overall Review: The Asus "-A" line of boards has been very reliable for generations, and Asus likely fine-tuned this board for optimum stability for the price, not features. Everything just worked for me, and Asus makes it easy to set up, except for that silly I/O panel... Tweakers note: CPU-z is not reading voltage correctly on Asus boards with the 6700K - use the excellent Asus AI Suite included with the board to read voltage. Also handy for overclocking within Windows.

Pros: -UEFI BIOS setup is nice -Nice variety of features -Easy set up (Q-Connector) -Works great This motherboard is a great mid-range board. The UEFI BIOS is great, easy to get around in and figure out what you are doing. EZ-mode makes it easier for beginners to figure out the set up and tweaking of the board and components. This motherboard has a little bit of everything available on the z170 chipset. Like any motherboard, it is easy to just plug everything into the right slot (except for possibly the CPU, see cons and other thoughts) and boot up. The Q-Connector makes plugging in all the case connections much easier. Haven't had any issues with the board since setting it up. No errors, crashes, failures to boot, or anything like that - seems to be a very solid board in terms of reliability so far.

Cons: -Rear shield -CPU Installation tool The rear shield is made of very cheap metal. Any other board I have bought in this price range has nicer material for the rear shield and usually something that is coordinated to the design of the motherboard in terms of color. I do not like the CPU installation tool; it makes the installation much more difficult than it has to be. I could see a beginner builder damaging the motherboard or CPU if they do something wrong with this tool. I have installed two other z170 boards that have no weird CPU installation tool – it seems unnecessary and more of a hindrance than a help.

Overall Review: Overall, I think this is a pretty good motherboard. I was able to do some minor overclocking with absolutely no issues. I try not to base a motherboard review on the features it offers – as everyone has different needs for their setup – but this board does have everything I personally am looking for, so that is a plus. I am deducting an egg for the CPU installation tool. It made the CPU installation much harder than on other z170 boards I have used. Plus with how many people seem to have damaged their motherboard by using it – I think it makes this motherboard harder to use than others.

Pros: This is a great looking motherboard, with an understated color scheme that blends in perfectly in my white NZXT H440 case. I especially like the white shroud covering the I/O ports. While the build quality is a bit lightweight and it has fewer features than more expensive boards, it is adequate for my needs, with six SATA III ports plus one M.2 slot, and two USB 3.1 ports (one type A and one type C) at the rear in addition to two regular USB3.0 and two 2.0 ports. The M.2 slot supports the new Samsung 950 Pro running at PCI-Express 3.0 x4 speeds- I installed the 512GB version as my boot drive (no problems there with a fresh install of Windows 10 Home) and got speeds of 2344 MB/s read and 1536 MB/s write (CrystalDiskMark scores), way faster than even the four Intel SSDs I have in RAID 0. It also does not steal bandwidth from my video cards, which run at x8 speeds in SLI. RAM slots support up to DDR4 3400. I installed two 16GB sticks of G.SKILL TridentZ DDR4 3000 and got the advertised speed without problem after setting it up in the UEFI. There is an "EZ XMP" switch on the motherboard to make things even easier, but it turns on a green LED when enabled, so I left it off for esthetic reasons. The board also has a "Mem OK" button which allows automatic retuning of a bad memory overclock, and a "TPU" switch which when set to "I" or "II" can adjust processor overclock settings based on whether your CPU is air-cooled or water-cooled, respectively. This is my first ASUS motherboard - it's only a small bonus, but the Q Connector for the front panel pins makes installing the leads much less fiddly, and I wish other manufacturers would provide something similar. Overclocking is easy whatever your experience level, from the EZ Mode section, or Advanced Mode section of the UEFI, then there is the QFan Control which lets you set individual fan profiles. I got an easy, stable 4.6GHz overclock on my i7-6700K which idles in the mid-20s and goes up to mid-70s under load, cooled by a Corsair H100i using SP120 Quiet Edition fans. This is about ten degrees cooler all round than my Z97 build with an i7-4790K at stock speeds (4.0GHz with 4.4GHz turbo, same H100i cooler) in a much higher end board, the Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming G1 - more a reflection on Skylake architecture vs. Haswell/Devil's Canyon than this board in particular. The UEFI has a Favorites section which lets you include your most used menu items from other areas, pretty handy if you delve into the UEFI a lot. From Windows, the ASUS AI Suite has a section which allows similar adjustments to those above, but once I had my UEFI preferences set I didn't use that after trying it, as I like to have as few background services running as possible. On the other hand, I really like the ASUS Boot Setting utility, which lets you reboot directly into BIOS/UEFI and also select Fast Boot/Normal Boot options.

Cons: ASUS has obviously cut corners on the build quality to provide everything this board has at a competitive price. Most notably, the flimsiest, ugliest I/O shield I have ever seen, stamped out of thin steel and with barely legible port labels. I managed not to cut my fingers on it, but installing the motherboard in the case required more force than I expected. I discovered why when I tried to plug in my mouse. Fortunately I had not supplied power yet, as one of the tabs on the I/O shield was bent out of position and was inserted into a USB port! Another reviewer had the same problem, it seems. ASUS, please persuade the bean counters to include a decent replacement, even for a couple of extra dollars on the price. The VRM heatsinks are held down via pushpins rather than screws, and look pretty lightweight, although I have not had any overheating issues. There is no debug LED display on the board. Instead, there are single red LEDs by the various areas (GPU, PCH, RAM) that light up during POST as each section is tested, then turn off when the test is passed. So you get a rough idea of what the problem may be, or rather where it is, but it's not as specific as a numerical code. The audio codec is another area which has been skimped on, as it is the ALC 892 rather than the ALC 1150 which is almost standard on mid-range boards now.

Overall Review: This has just enough features for an entry-level Skylake gaming board at a price ASUS has met by aggressively trimming back on certain aspects, some of which relate to build quality eg that atrocious I/O shield, and some to functionality, eg the audio codec, number of SATA ports, lack of debug display etc.. On the other hand, the looks are attractive, and as long as everything keeps working I am quite happy with it. I use audio over HDMI or Displayport, and also have a USB DAC, so the ALC 892 codec doesn't matter as much as if I used the analog outputs. I replaced my previous high end Z97 board with this in my gaming rig due to its M.2 slot for which I purchased the Samsung 950 Pro. Is it worth upgrading to this if you have an adequate Haswell, Ivy Bridge or even Sandy Bridge system? For gaming, probably not, given the cost of a new CPU plus DDR4 RAM in addition to the motherboard. Your money would be better spent on a video card upgrade, in most cases, unless you already have a really high-end card or cards that you know are being bottle-necked. If you want faster storage options, then this does beat previous generations with that native PCI-e x4 M.2 slot and more native Intel SATA III ports than Ivy Bridge or older. Testing benchmarks against my Z97 rig the Intel 530 iGPU easily beat that system's 4600 iGPU in Unigine Valley - 27FPS vs 19FPS at Low settings. With video cards installed, scores were about the same. Cinebench CPU scores were about 10% higher on the Skylake build. If you're building a brand new system, then I would say go with Skylake, given the falling cost of DDR4. As for the ASUS Z170-A, it's good enough at a fairly decent price. I'd personally spend a few dollars more for beefier build quality, better audio codec etc., but this was provided to me by Newegg for review purposes. It looks good in my system, and once I flashed the latest BIOS it's been stable and running well with a 4.6GHz overclock. I am, however, deducting one egg for that cheap I/O shield and audio codec which other manufacturers have better versions of in this price range.

Pros: • The board has a very extensive and feature rich UEFI bios with and very appealing GUI. I was really impressed with the multitude of options under both the EZ-mode and advanced. It has the features varying from setting the fan profile all the way to changing CPU and DRAM voltages etc. I can spend several pages just talking about the BIOS and features. It also has an EZ tune Wizard that I recommend the beginner/intermediate overclocker use, it is both powerful and user-friendly. • The AI3 software suit in Windows is equally equipped to give your insight into all monitoring aspects. You can also change the BCLK, CPU multiplier and associated voltages under the TPU tab. Again I can spend a couple of pages on the multitude of features imbedded in the software • Setting up the board was really a breeze, no issues at all. For all intension purposes it was plug_and_play. Slot in the CPU, RAM, hook up your HDD/SSD, plug in your PSU and monitor and start up the system. It booted 1st time into the bios after hitting the “Del” button a few times one the boot logo appeared on the monitor. • Apart from the dedicated water cooler fan header and CPU fan one, you have another five chassis fan headers, so plenty of fan options for your case. • Although there is no onboard diagnostic LED display, the board does come with a few very useful onboard red LED’s that light up as you go through the boot cycle i.e. CPU, DRAM, VGA and boot LED’s that indicate where you are in the boot-up sequence. If you have a failure at any of these key points in the boot-up sequence the LED will stay lit for a few seconds and the board will shut down commencing by re-booting. • Few mid-range boards come with onboard power and re-set buttons, the Asus Z170-A does come with a power button, albeit it is a bit hidden away . It is right next to the green power LED sitting beside the 3rd PCi 3.0 Slot. • Board has with three PCi E 3.0 slots with x16 lanes, enough to run two big AMD or Nvidia cards in CFX or SLI. • A couple of SATA 3 6gb/s ports dedicated, or marked rather, for OS drives. • TPU (TurboV Processing unit) onboard toggle switch which you can disable if you run the CPU at stock speeds, set it to one (I) with air cooling and some modest OC (overclock) or to two (II) when you do water cooling and want to push your CPU to a nice OC. There is also a “CPU_OV” jumper you can move if you want to go dry ice or other extreme cooling to push the CPU to the edge. • Run the system using three power modes, Performance, Power saving or Away mode, very handy, all of this via BIOS or AI3 software. You can also use the 5-Way optimization function in the AI3 site to get the best settings for the system, it detects your setup and take you through the process. • Flash the latest BIOS either from the BIOS or via the AI3 software in Windows, both works equally well. The board came with BIOS ver 0604 and I flashed it to 1302 via EZ-update tool in the UEFI. • Priced very reasona

Cons: • When you hook up you water cooler to the onboard fan header marked “W_Pump” and you don’t have a fan plugged into the “CPU_Fan” you will get a CPU fan error when you boot up. You have two choices, either plug a fan into the CPU fan header or disable the CPU Fan. In order to disable it you need to go the “Monitor” tab located under the advanced menu. So you can see it is not straight forward, unless you know this outright it will take a while to figure out. • In order to run your DDR4 at XMP speeds you have to enable X.M.P. under the “EZ mode” menu otherwise your board will run it at JDEC speeds. Alternatively you can go to advanced mode and select the XMP speeds associated to your RAM sticks. So the board will not run the XMP profile unless you enable it. Not a big con but something to note nonetheless. • For the novice the BIOS can come across intimidating, it is not complicated but one needs to take the time to get to know it, it is very rich in terms of features so be patient, take your time and learn. • The CPU bracket/adaptor is a bit tricky and I can see people mess up the socket pins if they are not careful, make sure the CPU sits probably in the adaptor BEFORE you try to seat it into the socket. • This one is always a gripe from me and many benchers tinkering with boards…there is no CMOS reset button, just the standard two pins you have to short out with a screw driver if you need to reset the BIOS after a failed overclocking attempt. Please board makers put one on the back of the board, which will really help us out. It can’t be that cost inhibitive surely? • The “Features Manual” although very useful and packed with all the board’s features is very hard to read, the reason for this…all the screenshots of the AI3 software suite is poor quality black and white, you cannot make out what is what, so rather download the manual from the Asus website • If you install Windows 7 you will have a problem with any USB devices other than the keyboard and mouse used in the Bios. The USB 3.0 drivers need to be loaded before you install the OS otherwise your keyboard/mouse will not function during OS installation. This is a pain for those die-hards that want to stick with Win 7. For Win 8.0 and later your OS comes pre-loaded with USB 3.0 drivers so no issue there. The user’s guide explains you how to get the USB 3.0 drivers loaded if you use Win 7.

Overall Review: The Asus Z170-A falls into the mid-range series 100 motherboards that accommodates the new 6th generation 14nm Skylake CPU. The price is very reasonable for what you get and in my opinion you get a good bundle with this board. When you open the Z170-A box you will be greeted by a standard ATX black and white motherboard. Under the board you will find the following: Two manuals, a features manual that covers the Ai3 Dual Intelligent Processors 5 Windows software suite as well as the standard Users Guide you normal get with any motherboard. You also get a couple of SATA cables, IO backplate (not shielded, a bit cheap), front panel adaptor (well known of all Asus boards), a SLI bridge and the infamous Intel CPU installation tool. The setup I used is as follows: Asus Z170-A (this review board), Intel i5-6500 CPU with stock fan, 2 x 8 GB G.Skill DDR4-2400, OCZ Agility 60GB SSD, Corsair HX1000W PSU, LED monitor, USB keyboard and mouse. All of this on an open bench-rig so I could see the board and all peripherals while booting and running. The board itself is well laid out with three well spaced PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, plenty of fan headers and a few toggle switches to allow you to overvolt and overclock your CPU ie TPU switch and the CPU_OV jumper. On the front of the board are six SATA 6.0 Gb/s pots, one SATA Express and one M.2 socket. The SATA Express socket does occupy two SATA ports so you end up with four SATA 3 ports if you use the SATA Express option. At the back of the board you will get two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, LAN port as well as one USB 3.1 (standard) and a micro USB 3.1 socket. For your monitor you have four ports i.e. standard VGA, DVI, HDMI and DPI (did not expect a DPI port to be honest). Once I hooked up everything else and powered up the system using the onboard power switch the board flashed the red LED’s marked CPU, DRAM, VGA and the Boot_Device. To enter the UEFI Bios you punch the “Del” key a few times after boot logo.. The Bios is black and white with light blue accents. The Bios is really packed with a lot of features for the beginner, intermediate and enthusiast. I spend a good hour or two going through it to get familiarized. As I got a non-K CPU, overclocking was limited to what the Turbo feature of the TPU chip could yield. That said getting the CPU to run at 3.6 Ghz(default 3.2) was achieved with very little effort, all you need to do is set OC profile to auto and enable turbo mode, the board did the rest. After that proceed to install Windows, I recommend Win 8 or later so you get USB 3.0 pre-loaded. Once into Windows pop the Asus Z170 chipset support DVD into the DVD tray and install the chipset, LAN, USB and audio drivers, as well as VGA (onboard or GPU PCIe card). I recommend you install the AI3 software suite as well to access a whole host of features. There are 5 keys areas you can manage, monitor and change with the software ir TPU, Fans. Digi+VRM, Turbo App and EPU power saving modes.

Pros: Its simple. There isnt much to this board other than plug and play, meaning there arent a bunch of things that come with this board to make it cluttered. No additional fans, no toaster, aesthetically pleasing to look at too. Setup was pretty simple, but I think maybe its a little too simple. Installed everything pretty quickly...Im not into overclocking much anymore since this runs just as fast as my previous 4770k processor overclocked. My flight simulators run perfectly, but thats not really saying much because they played perfectly before. GTA5 runs pretty good too. Didnt have any issues loading up Windows 10.

Cons: Again, its too simple. There arent many peripherals to go with this. Only 3 SATA cables...what you see above is what you get. If you are thinking of RAID, then keep the number of disks down because the SATA connectors arent ergonomic. Plan on using a big case for this. Also, my Captain 360 doesnt fit as the heat spreaders on the top of the board interfere with the radiator. Im still playing with it, but looks like Im going to have to find another solution here. Could use some more USB ports on the back panel, but a hub works just as well. I have at least 10 things to plug in while flying, its nice to have something directly connected to the board.

Overall Review: Using a 6700k, DDR4 3000 Corsair Vengeance, 2x GTX970 cards, Corsair 760T case.

Pros: Asus again makes a a fine board. The BIOS is made for a beginner, so anyone can handle this for their first build. I used a G4400 Skylake LGA 1151 CPU to just get the board up to speed before buying a super fast Quad core I7. Decent speeds out of the box, with the setup I made. Feature rich board, 5 fan ports, 3 PCIe slots 6 Sata USB 3,2,1. As I mentioned before about the BIOS, easy to overclock, (I only bumped up slightly) White features are cool, but the rear cover is cheap steel. BiIOS contains more features then the board has. Overall a descent board for the entry gamer, build this one in order to get ready for the next. Displayport and HDMI work great, I do love the display port for video, my monitor is quite large and this board does drive it once you update. Mid-range price is a great place to start.

Cons: CPU tool is..............................strange

Overall Review: Spend a whole bunch of time tinkering away to find out the all the settings.