Gadgetory

hopefully you saw my dual nano gaming base build a few weeks ago if you didn't shame on you go and check it out right now there were a few really cool components featured in that build and one such component that really deserves its own review is the nifty little gigabyte Zed 170 MX gaming 5 with around a dozen micro ATX at 170 motherboards to pick from you might be wondering what made this gigabyte board stand out to me gigabyte offers just two micro ATX of 170 motherboards the Zed 170 MX gaming 5 and the cheaper Zed 170 m d3h priced at 150 u.s. or 260 AUD gaming 5 board cost a bit more around 30% more in fact for that money you get USB 3.1 optical audio out a much better onboard audio solution and a better board design for multi GPUs which was a key selling point for the julno new-build looking further abroad we find limited competition for the gaming 5 the closest thing is the ace sue said 170 m a d3 but a 125 dollars it's a good bit cheaper but it's also very much an inferior product in almost every regard meanwhile the flagship offering from a suit crashed the $200 barrier at a whopping 220 US dollars or hard-to-swallow 360 Australian dollars that price you get a board with many of the same or equivalent features so you start to see why we went with the gigabyte 7 117 MX gaming 5 out of the box all motherboards dining the Zed 170 chipset will have 6 SATA 6 gigabits per second ports at least half a dozen USB 3 ports as the chipset supports up to 10 dual PCIe x 16 slots Gigabit Ethernet and some kind of HD audio additionally there's an m2 port that can accommodate up to 80 millimeter long SSDs offering the full pcie 3.0 times for bandwidth including the package of four very cool-looking silver SATA cables and these are a nice touch to give the board a very premium look for those wondering these can be purchased separately online from places such as eBay they'll expect to pay a bit more than the traditional red or black cables in total there are seven USB 3 ports on offer three of which have down in the back panel gigabyte is bolster package with a pair of USB 3.1 ports which includes a type A and type C port on the i/o panel not just that but through the use of intel's USB AF certified controller this board is also thunderbolt ready to upgraded from the more standard dual PCIe x 16 slot configuration a three PCIe x 16 slots but of course just the primary slide is wired for the full time 16 bandwidth which will be offered when using a single graphics card the second slot is hardwired 2 x 8 bandwidth and when using SLI or crossfire both the primary and secondary cards will run at times 8 bandwidth which has no negative impact on performance finally the third PCIe x 16 slot is why at the times for bandwidth and assuming you can use two dual slot graphics cards it won't be accessible anyway a key feature of the z170 MX gaming 5 is the realtek ALC 1150 audio codec which has been spiced up using the sound blaster Xfire mp3 software suite also included is a Texas Instruments beurre Brown operational amplifier along with the high quality audio capacitors an audio noise guard with fancy LED trace path lighting the killer 80 2201 Gigabit Ethernet controller is a decent solution but I would have been just as happy with the Intel Gigabit LAN found on the cheaper d3h so don't see this as a noteworthy upgrade still that isn't to say others weren't find extra value in the killer network controller so there you have it features wires the gigabyte Zed 170 MX gaming phibes well equipped with high quality parts the board itself also looks great even if it is another black and red themed board layout is excellent and this is important for a compact micro ATX board the only disappointing aspect of the design is lack of useful buttons for enthusiasts such as a power and reset button along with the CMOS Clear button and an LED diagnostic display would have been a nice touch still given the price and gigabytes focus on features such as the USB DAC for stable voltage being thunderbolt ready and all those quality audio features we can forgive them for excluding these onboard buttons when it comes to benchmarking we aren't gonna waste your time by comparing the Zed 170 MH scammy phone's memory application gaming or even storage performance with others 170 or any other Intel 100 series motherboards for that matter rather let's take a brief look at the overclocking performance and features recently I've mostly been using Azeroth Asus and MSI motherboards all of which have great UF ease and while I would say gigabytes version on the zeb 170 MX gaming 5 it's just as good it did take some getting used to the menu system there are plenty of customizable options but working at where they all live is a bit tricky at first where I'm used to as rockiness oozes OC Tweaker type menus where although overclocking related options are under the one roof gigabyte splits things like CPU memory and voltage options across separate menus which I have to admit makes things a little tricky making the overclock a little more difficult was the fact that I only had on hand a core i5 6600 K processor that I bought a few days prior to testing so I haven't yet worked out its own limits therefore I started with gigabytes performance upgrade feature to see how easy it would be for novice users to extract extra performance from their system frequencies ranging from 4 point 2 gigahertz up to 4.6 gigahertz are available unfortunately my 6600 caged chip wasn't stable using the highest option and I had to settle for the 4.5 gigahertz setting which is almost a 30% increase over the base cloth and 15% higher than the max turbo clock based on user overclocking reports in the 6600 K most seem to reach at least 4 point 5 gigahertz with the ceiling being around 4.6 to 4.8 gigahertz at 4.5 TB hurts the CPU temperature never went about 55 degrees when placed on the full load we'll be using the thermal take water 3.0 ring RGB 240 all-in-one liquid cooler unfortunately no matter how much messing around with voltages and other tweakable settings I wasn't able to get the Zeb 170 MX game e5 my new 6600 K is stable at over 4.5 gigahertz even with the B core of 1.4 which was disappointing other tweakable settings such as the extreme memory profile works well we had no trouble loading the more aggressive profile and I Kingston HyperX savage ddr4 3000 memory in my opinion the gigabyte Zeb 117 mhm gave me 5 offers the perfect balance of features and price probably the best of any micro ATX dev 170 motherboard available today and now it's late last year it's a relative newcomer and if I was shopping for a micro ATX ed 170 motherboard for a gaming rig and certainly be my number one choice when compared to similarly priced board such as the a drop step 170 M extreme poor and a su step 170 M plus the gigabyte sev 170 MX k me fibers without a question better overall package gigabyte off as a better audio solution and what is arguably a better network controller for gaming though I'm very much on the fence about that one does every 170 MX gaming 5 also does pack a better power delivery design which means you should achieve higher overclocks the way I've cost lucked out here overall it's my opinion that the gigabyte board is of a higher quality as well which for me further helps to justify the slight price premium honestly I have to say I'm a little surprised by the price particularly given how much it Zeus is asking for the ROG Maximus 8 gene which for the most part isn't a superior board certainly not to the extent that the 40% price premium could be justified overall gigabyte has put together very solid package with the z170 MX gaming 5 and I expect it will satisfy any gamer hoping to build a compact micro ATX gaming machine as always I'm your host Matt and thanks for checking out the gigabyte said 170 MX gaming fine with me also remember you can check out the written version of this review and all of our other reviews at our website Harbor and box com have a great day and I'll see you next time when I overclock or laying on my 6700 K so hard it gives up its offshore accounts