Building a workstation with the Intel Z170 chipset can be a great way to get a lot of raw CPU horsepower, but it's not without its challenges. In this article, we'll explore some of the issues that come with using the Z170 chipset and how you can overcome them.

One of the main challenges with the Z170 chipset is that it uses non-air cooling systems for both CPUs, which can be a bit tricky to work with. Some motherboards will only work with air cooling, while others will allow you to use liquid cooling or even a combination of both. However, when using liquid cooling, you need to make sure that the memory modules are correct type of memory and also make sure that they're compatible with the motherboard. I tried to set this up but I could not get it to post at all with non-air cooling memory which kind of makes sense because Zeon but I just thought I would try it because some boards will actually work with a Zeon even without error correcting memory, which is interesting and I didn't know if that was something present in this line of Zeeon or something interesting going on that in terms of like what Intel is doing.

The motherboard I'm using for this build is the Intel Z170 chipset-based motherboard. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to post with non-error correcting memory, and the test Zeon 1650 that I have now because I'm using a Zeon 1650 I can only use one socket. I'm just using that for testing until my Xeon 26xx series CPU gets here. Intel doesn't offer an Intel retail Edge program which is sort of a discounted buy program that Intel offers people if you work at Best Buy but not if you make instructional videos on YouTube, so I won't be able to get it at a discount.

However, this motherboard will still do the job for most non-scientific workload multimedia workstation type things. If you want to run high-end applications or games, you'll need something with more than 16 cores and a higher clock speed. But if you're building a workstation for general use, such as video editing, 3D modeling, or scientific computing, this motherboard will definitely do the job.

One of the great things about this motherboard is that it has a three-year warranty, which gives you peace of mind in case something goes wrong. The UEFI firmware is very vanilla, but it has a lot of features, including support for multiple GPUs and high-speed storage options.

In terms of the hardware layout, the motherboard has a capacitors for the audio solution, VGA header, RS232 serial port, physical power and reset buttons, three fan headers, LED diagnostic code, USB options, and an M.2 socket 3 next to that. The TPM header and front panel header are also present. There's one USB 2.0 port and two USB3 ports, as well as eight SATA Express ports and eight SATA III ports. Two chassis fan headers round out the rear I/O section.

When it comes to the power supply, you'll need to make sure that it has a dual 8-pin CPU output, which is necessary for running multiple CPUs. This can be a bit of a challenge, as not all power supplies have this feature. However, with a good quality power supply, you should be able to run two CPUs and still get plenty of headroom for other components.

Overall, the Intel Z170 chipset-based motherboard is a great option for building a workstation. It has plenty of raw CPU horsepower, support for multiple GPUs and high-speed storage options, and a three-year warranty. However, it does require some special considerations when it comes to cooling and power supply. With the right setup, this motherboard can handle even the most demanding workloads.

In terms of the build video, we'll be using the Z170 chipset-based motherboard with a Zeon 1650 CPU, but ultimately, this thing is going to get some Xeon 26xx series CPUs so I can actually populate both slots and use both sets of RAM. This is because running one CPU will only allow you to use half of the PCI Express lanes, which can be a bit restrictive for some applications.

Finally, if you're considering building a workstation with the Intel Z170 chipset, we recommend checking out the forums at Tech syndicate.com. The community there is very active and knowledgeable, and they've got a lot of experience with this motherboard and other workstation-related topics. With their advice, you should be able to build a powerful and efficient workstation that meets your needs.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI think we're long overdue for a workstation let's take a look at a dual socket Zeon motherboard from Asus all right so this is going to be actually a two for one video so we're on the hardware Channel right now with this video we're going to take a look at the Asus Z10 P d8 WS this is a workstation SLS server class motherboard but it's not too difficult to build a system around it so it's got a lot of features that you would find on a desktop motherboard and it's not so obscenely large that it's impossible to find a case for it this motherboard is a dual socket motherboard meaning that it's really designed for Xeon E5 26xx series processors V3 so that's socket 2011-3 this is the c612 chipset also not x99 because x99 can't do two CPUs basically this is a dual socket motherboard designed for dual CPUs this motherboard is a pretty good choice for a workstation motherboard and we're going to dive in and take a look at the features that are on the board now there's something to be said for a motherboard layout like this this particular size of motherboard is 12 x 13 in so this is pretty large for an ATX motherboard and technically speaking it's not actually an ATX form factor this form factor is called EB the EB form factor is something that you see in in servers a lot and so there are cases out there that are you know ludicrously expensive and will hold e motherboards they're really Server Chassis and things like that there's not really a lot out there that is designed to run cool and quiet that works with this particular motherboard however on the main Channel we've got a build video for you with this particular motherboard and we use the Corsair 750d I don't want to spoil that video this video is just about the motherboard and the features that are on this particular motherboard but if you want to see the build with this video be sure to check the description because there's a link to the other video on the main Channel and these videos should come out at roughly the same time you should also be able to head on over to the Forum at Tech syndicate.com and see more details about this particular motherboard and its built so looking at the motherboard layout on this particular motherboard and knowing that this motherboard is the extra extra large 12 x 13 in look at it and look how crowded it still looks they've managed to cram two socket 2011-3 CPU sockets on this motherboard and each CPU socket is able to operate a CPU in Quad Channel configuration now this motherboard still only has a total of eight dim slots but it's four dim slots per CPU now for testing purposes I'm going to be testing this motherboard with a Zeon E5 1650 now 1600 series CPUs uh don't actually support operating with more than one socket so if you were to get two 1600 series CPUs for example that won't work you would have to get two 2600 series zons that's sort of Intel's naming convention the first number basically tells you how many sockets on the motherboard this CPU will work with so if you got a Zeon 1650 for example it'll only work in single CPU configurations uh there's an interface between CPUs called quick path and sometimes you see it on boxes in the descriptions as qpi and it's like oh how many qpi transactions per second does the CPU support the quick path is sort of an interconnect that's very high speed between the CPUs it's not unlike the memory bus but it's designed for inter CPU communication and we can see that the motherboard real estate is basically dominated by the CPU and RAM slots in this particular case now you'll also notice that we've got a whole Bevy of PCI Express slots seven of them the thing that you got to remember is that when you're running these E5 zons we're talking about 40 PCI Express Lanes per CPU up to 40 PCI Express Lanes per CPU that gives you a lot of PCI Express connectivity so if you're running this motherboard as you should with two E5 2600 series zons then you're going to have a lot of PCI Express Lanes at your disposal I mean you get up to 40 PCI Express Lanes per CPU so with this particular slot layout you can actually run all of the slots if you this thing's completely fully loaded all of the slots are going to be running at PCI Express by 8 that is a crazy amount of PCI Express connectivity not only that this motherboard also has integrated VGA it's not like the VGA provided by the CPU because the Zeon E5 CPUs don't have onboard VGA like you know Skylake or or Haswell there's actually an aspeed as 2400 VGA adapter that comes with this motherboard now the back plate doesn't actually have the VGA connector but the motherboard in the Box comes with a VGA breakout header so if you were going to say run this in some kind of server capacity where you don't need a an addin video card or you've got addin you know co-processor cards like the Zeon fee uh you can just populate this board with those cards and then use the onboard VGA adapter you don't actually even need a graphics card at the back of the board you've got the combo PS2 mouse and keyboard Port two USB 2.0 ports we've got a q code logger and USB bios flashback USB bios flashback will allow you to update the ufi update the BIOS whatever you want to call it without actually even having a bootable system you can do that by just copying the BIOS to the flash drive naming it a certain thing hitting this button and even if the system is in an off State it will update the UEFI from whatever's on the flash the Q code logger will actually copy the post code and Di ostic information to a flash drive in case you have a system that won't boot which can be used to further diagnose the system so that's kind of a neat feature then we've got an optical spdf then at the back we've got six USB 3.0 ports now four of these are provided by the Intel chipset two are provided by the as media controller both of the USB 3.0 headers for the front panel those are also provided by an as media USB 3.0 controller then we've got two Intel i210 GB Lan adapters and then we've got our onboard realtech ALC 1158 Channel analog audio solution the audio front panel connection is just below this which is not really a super convenient location for the audio front panel connector I found it was actually easier to run the front panel connector down the side of the motherboard when I was doing the build um than to actually try to run it from the bottom just because if you run the audio cable down the board uh it's going to be trampled by the PCI Express expansion slots so I just ran it over the top and had the audio cable behind the motherboard that worked out pretty well now in terms of fan support this motherboard has seven onboard chassis fan connections and two extra fan connections for the CPU those are all four pin and for this particular motherboard I would recommend that you use pwm fans only the UEFI does have an option for controlling the fans but it's not nearly the level of flexibility that we've seen on sort of the consumer and the Enthusiast boards but we don't really expect that from a workstation product the motherboard also has an onboard um ikvm but in order to activate it you're going to need the asm8 module to do that and that will activate the uh the ikvm or ipmi functionality um for this particular motherboard it is an add-in card it is an option but this motherboard supports it so if you need you know ipmi or remote support this motherboard will do it if you don't know what ipmi is you should check out our video on ipmi because it's uh it's a really neat technology for remotely managing things and so if you're going to be using this in a workstation configuration you probably don't need that but if you're going to be using this as a server then you probably would want to look into ipmi because ipmi lets you remotely take control of the computer you can reinstall the operating system you can operate just like like you were sitting at it locally one other cool feature of this motherboard in the UEFI is that it does actually have overclocking capabilities yeah so if you're going to run Zeon and you're going to you know it's like oh let's over voltage and crank the CPU speed and you know crank all this stuff the UEFI does actually support a lot of really cool options in terms of overclocking now most of the time people that are running zeeon don't really want to overclock but the reality is that most zons have a limited built-in ability to overclock Intel calls that you know turbo boost or you know turbo whatever and what that does is if you are using a limited number of CPU cores it'll run those CPU cores at a higher clock frequency just because the other CPU cores are shut down the CPU has a better ability to dissipate the heat from that and so it can run at a higher speed for a limited time and that fits within the design parameters of the particular CPU so what Asus has done is sort of given you some options to tweak that you can get longer runtime in terms of how long your CPU will run in Turbo and they've tweaked some of the other parameters so you can still get Turbo and you can still get better performance but still kind of sort of operating within the parameters that Intel has set it's just down to the particular options that are offered in the UEFI so that's a lot of fun to play with but if you're building a workstation you really want it to be super stable so keep that in mind now in terms of memory support you really want to be using registered eror correcting memory with this motherboard it supports a couple of different kinds of motherboards so be sure to consult the vendor guide or the memory guide for this particular motherboard if you're going to get this and set it up but I will tell you that I could not get it to post at all with non-air crack memory that kind of makes sense because Zeon but I just thought I would try it because some boards will actually work with a Zeon even without error correcting memory which is interesting and I didn't know if that was something present in this line of zeeon or something interesting going on that in terms of like what Intel is doing but this motherboard pretty much I couldn't get it to post with nonerror correcting memory and the test Zeon 1650 that I have now because I'm using a Zeon 1650 I can only use one socket I'm just using that for testing until my Xeon 26xx series CPU gets here Intel I don't know we can't we can't join the Intel retail Edge program which is sort of a discounted buy program that Intel offers people if you work at Best Buy but not if you make instructional videos on YouTube so I'm not going to pay retail for 2600 series xeons for a workstation but I will pay retail I guess for Zeon 1650 cuz H that's it's close enough so what we're going to do for the build video is with a Zeon 1650 But ultimately this thing is going to get some 2600 V3 series zon so I can actually populate both slots and you use both sets of ram if you only run one CPU you don't get to use all the PCI Express Lanes either because half of the PCI Express slots are wired to one CPU and the other half are wired to the other CPU and so if you're only running one CPU half the PCI Express slots don't work it makes sense along the bottom edge of the motherboard we've got the capacitors for the audio solution our VGA header our rs232 serial Port our physical power and reset buttons three fan headers the LED uh LED diagnostic code and then we've got our USB options there's one USB 2.0 port and then two usb3 ports and our m.2 socket 3 next to that we've got the TPM header and our front panel header we've got an auxiliary power port and then we've got two SATA Express ports and our eight sata 3 6 GB per second ports then we've got another two chassis fan headers and then of course our memory slots both the ATX 24 pin connector and both 8 Pin connectors for the CPUs are on the top of the board now you you will need to make sure that the power supply that you get has a dual eight pin CPU output so you need not one but two 12volt 8pen connectors that are designed for CPUs the eight pen connector that supplies 12 volts for graphics cards is a different uh is a different pen out a different connector style than the connector for the CPU so you need to make sure that your power supply if you're going to build a system with this actually has two 8 Pin CPU outputs because each CPU CPU uh each CPU input on the motherboard supplies a different CPU socket with that cpu's power so running two CPUs uh it's like two systems in one the other nice thing with this board is that it's got a three-year warranty so overall uh we've already actually been running this thing for a while so I've sort of got to play with it the UEFI is a very very um vanilla UEFI but it has a lot of features so overall in terms of a workstation motherboard if you're looking for lots of raw CPU horsepower this will do it if you want to be able to run 18 core zons two of them this motherboard will do it although you should look at the workstation class E5 zons a lot of the time Intel crams a bunch of cores in the CPU but then they really really Throttle Down the clock speed unless you really cough up a lot of money with something like this a really high clock speed 6 or eight core generally for most people for most non-scientific workload multimedia workstation type things will will actually outperform uh something that's like you know 18 cores but only 2 gigahertz you know generally that's what we'd recommend but if you're considering a workstation build you really should probably head on over to the forums Tech syndicate.com we've got a lot of people that have spent a lot of money on various different workstations this motherboard included there's a lot of people there that can give you really good advice in terms of you know what to get and what you're building in terms of building a workstation there's a whole lot of options out there different stuff different motherboards I would encourage you to join us on the forums at Tech syndicate.com I'm wle I'm signing out and I'll see you there ohI think we're long overdue for a workstation let's take a look at a dual socket Zeon motherboard from Asus all right so this is going to be actually a two for one video so we're on the hardware Channel right now with this video we're going to take a look at the Asus Z10 P d8 WS this is a workstation SLS server class motherboard but it's not too difficult to build a system around it so it's got a lot of features that you would find on a desktop motherboard and it's not so obscenely large that it's impossible to find a case for it this motherboard is a dual socket motherboard meaning that it's really designed for Xeon E5 26xx series processors V3 so that's socket 2011-3 this is the c612 chipset also not x99 because x99 can't do two CPUs basically this is a dual socket motherboard designed for dual CPUs this motherboard is a pretty good choice for a workstation motherboard and we're going to dive in and take a look at the features that are on the board now there's something to be said for a motherboard layout like this this particular size of motherboard is 12 x 13 in so this is pretty large for an ATX motherboard and technically speaking it's not actually an ATX form factor this form factor is called EB the EB form factor is something that you see in in servers a lot and so there are cases out there that are you know ludicrously expensive and will hold e motherboards they're really Server Chassis and things like that there's not really a lot out there that is designed to run cool and quiet that works with this particular motherboard however on the main Channel we've got a build video for you with this particular motherboard and we use the Corsair 750d I don't want to spoil that video this video is just about the motherboard and the features that are on this particular motherboard but if you want to see the build with this video be sure to check the description because there's a link to the other video on the main Channel and these videos should come out at roughly the same time you should also be able to head on over to the Forum at Tech syndicate.com and see more details about this particular motherboard and its built so looking at the motherboard layout on this particular motherboard and knowing that this motherboard is the extra extra large 12 x 13 in look at it and look how crowded it still looks they've managed to cram two socket 2011-3 CPU sockets on this motherboard and each CPU socket is able to operate a CPU in Quad Channel configuration now this motherboard still only has a total of eight dim slots but it's four dim slots per CPU now for testing purposes I'm going to be testing this motherboard with a Zeon E5 1650 now 1600 series CPUs uh don't actually support operating with more than one socket so if you were to get two 1600 series CPUs for example that won't work you would have to get two 2600 series zons that's sort of Intel's naming convention the first number basically tells you how many sockets on the motherboard this CPU will work with so if you got a Zeon 1650 for example it'll only work in single CPU configurations uh there's an interface between CPUs called quick path and sometimes you see it on boxes in the descriptions as qpi and it's like oh how many qpi transactions per second does the CPU support the quick path is sort of an interconnect that's very high speed between the CPUs it's not unlike the memory bus but it's designed for inter CPU communication and we can see that the motherboard real estate is basically dominated by the CPU and RAM slots in this particular case now you'll also notice that we've got a whole Bevy of PCI Express slots seven of them the thing that you got to remember is that when you're running these E5 zons we're talking about 40 PCI Express Lanes per CPU up to 40 PCI Express Lanes per CPU that gives you a lot of PCI Express connectivity so if you're running this motherboard as you should with two E5 2600 series zons then you're going to have a lot of PCI Express Lanes at your disposal I mean you get up to 40 PCI Express Lanes per CPU so with this particular slot layout you can actually run all of the slots if you this thing's completely fully loaded all of the slots are going to be running at PCI Express by 8 that is a crazy amount of PCI Express connectivity not only that this motherboard also has integrated VGA it's not like the VGA provided by the CPU because the Zeon E5 CPUs don't have onboard VGA like you know Skylake or or Haswell there's actually an aspeed as 2400 VGA adapter that comes with this motherboard now the back plate doesn't actually have the VGA connector but the motherboard in the Box comes with a VGA breakout header so if you were going to say run this in some kind of server capacity where you don't need a an addin video card or you've got addin you know co-processor cards like the Zeon fee uh you can just populate this board with those cards and then use the onboard VGA adapter you don't actually even need a graphics card at the back of the board you've got the combo PS2 mouse and keyboard Port two USB 2.0 ports we've got a q code logger and USB bios flashback USB bios flashback will allow you to update the ufi update the BIOS whatever you want to call it without actually even having a bootable system you can do that by just copying the BIOS to the flash drive naming it a certain thing hitting this button and even if the system is in an off State it will update the UEFI from whatever's on the flash the Q code logger will actually copy the post code and Di ostic information to a flash drive in case you have a system that won't boot which can be used to further diagnose the system so that's kind of a neat feature then we've got an optical spdf then at the back we've got six USB 3.0 ports now four of these are provided by the Intel chipset two are provided by the as media controller both of the USB 3.0 headers for the front panel those are also provided by an as media USB 3.0 controller then we've got two Intel i210 GB Lan adapters and then we've got our onboard realtech ALC 1158 Channel analog audio solution the audio front panel connection is just below this which is not really a super convenient location for the audio front panel connector I found it was actually easier to run the front panel connector down the side of the motherboard when I was doing the build um than to actually try to run it from the bottom just because if you run the audio cable down the board uh it's going to be trampled by the PCI Express expansion slots so I just ran it over the top and had the audio cable behind the motherboard that worked out pretty well now in terms of fan support this motherboard has seven onboard chassis fan connections and two extra fan connections for the CPU those are all four pin and for this particular motherboard I would recommend that you use pwm fans only the UEFI does have an option for controlling the fans but it's not nearly the level of flexibility that we've seen on sort of the consumer and the Enthusiast boards but we don't really expect that from a workstation product the motherboard also has an onboard um ikvm but in order to activate it you're going to need the asm8 module to do that and that will activate the uh the ikvm or ipmi functionality um for this particular motherboard it is an add-in card it is an option but this motherboard supports it so if you need you know ipmi or remote support this motherboard will do it if you don't know what ipmi is you should check out our video on ipmi because it's uh it's a really neat technology for remotely managing things and so if you're going to be using this in a workstation configuration you probably don't need that but if you're going to be using this as a server then you probably would want to look into ipmi because ipmi lets you remotely take control of the computer you can reinstall the operating system you can operate just like like you were sitting at it locally one other cool feature of this motherboard in the UEFI is that it does actually have overclocking capabilities yeah so if you're going to run Zeon and you're going to you know it's like oh let's over voltage and crank the CPU speed and you know crank all this stuff the UEFI does actually support a lot of really cool options in terms of overclocking now most of the time people that are running zeeon don't really want to overclock but the reality is that most zons have a limited built-in ability to overclock Intel calls that you know turbo boost or you know turbo whatever and what that does is if you are using a limited number of CPU cores it'll run those CPU cores at a higher clock frequency just because the other CPU cores are shut down the CPU has a better ability to dissipate the heat from that and so it can run at a higher speed for a limited time and that fits within the design parameters of the particular CPU so what Asus has done is sort of given you some options to tweak that you can get longer runtime in terms of how long your CPU will run in Turbo and they've tweaked some of the other parameters so you can still get Turbo and you can still get better performance but still kind of sort of operating within the parameters that Intel has set it's just down to the particular options that are offered in the UEFI so that's a lot of fun to play with but if you're building a workstation you really want it to be super stable so keep that in mind now in terms of memory support you really want to be using registered eror correcting memory with this motherboard it supports a couple of different kinds of motherboards so be sure to consult the vendor guide or the memory guide for this particular motherboard if you're going to get this and set it up but I will tell you that I could not get it to post at all with non-air crack memory that kind of makes sense because Zeon but I just thought I would try it because some boards will actually work with a Zeon even without error correcting memory which is interesting and I didn't know if that was something present in this line of zeeon or something interesting going on that in terms of like what Intel is doing but this motherboard pretty much I couldn't get it to post with nonerror correcting memory and the test Zeon 1650 that I have now because I'm using a Zeon 1650 I can only use one socket I'm just using that for testing until my Xeon 26xx series CPU gets here Intel I don't know we can't we can't join the Intel retail Edge program which is sort of a discounted buy program that Intel offers people if you work at Best Buy but not if you make instructional videos on YouTube so I'm not going to pay retail for 2600 series xeons for a workstation but I will pay retail I guess for Zeon 1650 cuz H that's it's close enough so what we're going to do for the build video is with a Zeon 1650 But ultimately this thing is going to get some 2600 V3 series zon so I can actually populate both slots and you use both sets of ram if you only run one CPU you don't get to use all the PCI Express Lanes either because half of the PCI Express slots are wired to one CPU and the other half are wired to the other CPU and so if you're only running one CPU half the PCI Express slots don't work it makes sense along the bottom edge of the motherboard we've got the capacitors for the audio solution our VGA header our rs232 serial Port our physical power and reset buttons three fan headers the LED uh LED diagnostic code and then we've got our USB options there's one USB 2.0 port and then two usb3 ports and our m.2 socket 3 next to that we've got the TPM header and our front panel header we've got an auxiliary power port and then we've got two SATA Express ports and our eight sata 3 6 GB per second ports then we've got another two chassis fan headers and then of course our memory slots both the ATX 24 pin connector and both 8 Pin connectors for the CPUs are on the top of the board now you you will need to make sure that the power supply that you get has a dual eight pin CPU output so you need not one but two 12volt 8pen connectors that are designed for CPUs the eight pen connector that supplies 12 volts for graphics cards is a different uh is a different pen out a different connector style than the connector for the CPU so you need to make sure that your power supply if you're going to build a system with this actually has two 8 Pin CPU outputs because each CPU CPU uh each CPU input on the motherboard supplies a different CPU socket with that cpu's power so running two CPUs uh it's like two systems in one the other nice thing with this board is that it's got a three-year warranty so overall uh we've already actually been running this thing for a while so I've sort of got to play with it the UEFI is a very very um vanilla UEFI but it has a lot of features so overall in terms of a workstation motherboard if you're looking for lots of raw CPU horsepower this will do it if you want to be able to run 18 core zons two of them this motherboard will do it although you should look at the workstation class E5 zons a lot of the time Intel crams a bunch of cores in the CPU but then they really really Throttle Down the clock speed unless you really cough up a lot of money with something like this a really high clock speed 6 or eight core generally for most people for most non-scientific workload multimedia workstation type things will will actually outperform uh something that's like you know 18 cores but only 2 gigahertz you know generally that's what we'd recommend but if you're considering a workstation build you really should probably head on over to the forums Tech syndicate.com we've got a lot of people that have spent a lot of money on various different workstations this motherboard included there's a lot of people there that can give you really good advice in terms of you know what to get and what you're building in terms of building a workstation there's a whole lot of options out there different stuff different motherboards I would encourage you to join us on the forums at Tech syndicate.com I'm wle I'm signing out and I'll see you there oh\n"