Asus Z170-Deluxe Review

Overclocking

Due to time constraints, we've focussed purely on the multiplier for overclocking our Core i7-6700K and started at 4.6GHz with a vcore of 1.3V. We gradually ramped this up all the way to 5GHz with a vcore of 1.37V and everything seemed fine until we hit Terragen 3, where the system crashed every time.

Despite increasing the vcore to 1.4V and the limit of our all-in-one liquid cooler, we couldn't get things stable at 5GHz, or even 4.9GHz. In the end, we settled with 4.8GHz but given more time and slightly better cooling, we believe 5GHz would have been an realistic target.

EFI

Asus has tweaked its EFIs for Skylake and the Signature series now includes tools such as SSD secure erase - a feature that was traditionally confined to ROG boards. As we mentioned earlier, the water pump connector is now present on the PCB for all-in-one liquid coolers and there's a dedicated readout in the EFI's monitor section too. Overall, though, the look and feel is pretty much the same although that's no bad thing - its EFIs were the best in Z97, with MSI on par and ASRock and Gigabyte in second place.







Head over the page to see the Performance Analysis, Conclusion and Scores.