Gigabyte Z170-Gaming K3 Review

Performance Analysis

Performance at stock speed was quite poor and we couldn't quite see what the issue was as the CPU seemed to be boosting fine and a reinstall of Windows didn't seem to help either. However, it wasn't last in all the performance benchmarks and matched or bettered many of the other slow results we've seen. Even then, the variance was marginal - just 5 seconds slower than 111 seconds , which was the best result in the PCMark 8 4K Video Editing test and 2 seconds down from 30 seconds in the Photo Editing test and just 24 seconds slower than the top result of 369 in Terragen 3.


Even so, you'd be well-advised to apply an overclock as this seemed to work wonders for the board. The Terragen 3 time dropped to 339 seconds which was a mid-table result as were the new numbers in our PCMark 8 tests and Cinebench too. Only some of our game tests such as Unigine Valley remained bottom of the pile, with a particularly slow result at stock speed too. The high vcore needed when overclocking did punch up the power consumption, however.


Thankfully, elsewhere results were much better. It was just 7MB/sec off the pace in our M.2 test - well within the margin of error considering the read speed was 2,293MB/sec, and there was nothing untoward in the SATA 6Gbps test either. However, the audio tests were by far the best, where it leapfrogged the similarly-priced MSI Z170A SLI Plus by a big margin and had similar results to the majority of other boards too.

Conclusion

If you're looking for strong audio performance on a budget, then Gigabyte's Z170-Gaming K3 is a great choice, especially combined with a full-speed M.2 port and very decent overclocking performance thrown in for the price too. At just £96, if you intend to build a basic single GPU system, slap on an overclock, close your side panel and forget about your hardware, it makes for a compelling motherboard at a very reasonable price, easily beating many more expensive boards such as the likes of MSI's Z170A SLI Plus.

There are some caveats, though, such as no USB 3.1 Type-C port, no physical overclocking tool and no SLI support plus the related lack of dual x8/x8 mode even if you went with a CrossFire setup. Things are extremely competitive at this end of the market and for around £10-15 more there are a couple of models out there that offer some or all of these extra features (ASRock's Extreme4 in particular ticks most of the above boxes and costs less than £110 if you shop around). Gigabyte has done very well to keep the price below £100 here and while we'd argue paying that little bit extra for the ASRock board is worth it to get those extra features, if £100 is your absolute limit, then the Z170-Gaming K3 it's currently your best option.