Aorus Z270X Gaming 5 Motherboard Review from Gigabyte
**Gigabyte Z270x Gaming 5 Motherboard Review: A Comprehensive Look**
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### Introduction
In this video, we take a closer look at the Gigabyte Z270x Gaming 5 motherboard. The video opens with an intriguing scene involving a serpent guard, an orus guard, and a satesh guard meeting on a neutral planet, with tensions running high. However, the focus quickly shifts to the motherboard itself, as the narrator poses the rhetorical question: "Is it wrong that I delight so much in these things?" This sets the stage for an in-depth exploration of the Z270x Gaming 5 motherboard, its features, and its capabilities.
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### Design and Aesthetics
The Z270x Gaming 5 is described as a middle-of-the-road motherboard from Gigabyte, designed with enthusiasts in mind. It offers a balance between high-end features and affordability. The video highlights the motherboard's RGB lighting capabilities, which are a standout feature. Instead of the standard RGB header, this motherboard uses an RGBW (Red, Green, Blue, White) five-pin header. This allows for more precise control over white light output, ensuring that white LEDs can be used effectively without compromising on brightness or purity.
The motherboard also comes with the RGB Fusion app, which provides extensive control over the various RGB zones. Users can customize the lighting to respond to music, system temperatures, or simply choose static colors. The app offers a range of modes, including color cycling, flash mode, and intelligent lighting that adapts to system conditions. Additionally, there's an accent overlay on the front of the motherboard that can be swapped out for custom patterns, allowing users to personalize their build further.
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### Technical Specifications
The Z270x Gaming 5 is a socket 1151 motherboard, compatible with both Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs. It features a z270 chipset, which brings improved USB 3.1 Gen 2 support and other peripheral enhancements. The motherboard supports DDR4 memory up to 4,000 MHz and has four RAM slots for expandability.
In terms of storage, the Z270x Gaming 5 offers two M.2 ports (one supporting 110mm devices) and three SATA Express connections. It also supports triple NVMe RAID configurations, though the video recommends investing in a single high-performance NVMe drive rather than multiple slower ones for optimal performance.
The motherboard features robust cooling solutions, including PWM and DC hybrid fan control through Smart Fan5. There are five 4-pin fan headers, two of which can handle up to 2A for powering water pumps or other high-end cooling solutions. Additionally, the Z270x Gaming 5 includes an external base clock generator, allowing users to fine-tune their overclocking setup.
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### Overclocking and Performance
The video touches on the motherboard's overclocking capabilities, highlighting that it can support Intel i7 CPUs running at speeds up to 5.4 GHz (though this may require a unicorn CPU!). The UEFI interface is praised for its simplicity and effectiveness, with an OC button making it easy to enable overclocking. However, the video notes that manual tweaking of voltages and multipliers is still necessary for serious overclocking.
The Z270x Gaming 5 also supports XMP profiles for DDR4 memory, ensuring optimal performance when paired with compatible RAM modules. The motherboard's dual BIOS feature allows users to switch between primary and secondary BIOS configurations, which is particularly useful for updating or troubleshooting.
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### Audio Quality
For audio enthusiasts, the Z270x Gaming 5 features a Sound Blaster X-Fi MB5 sound solution based on the Realtek ALC1220 codec. This provides high-quality audio output with a signal-to-noise ratio of 120 dB and a smart headphone amplifier. The audio codec is socketed, allowing users to replace it with alternative amplifiers if desired. Additionally, the motherboard includes gold-plated SPDIF connectors for premium sound quality.
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### Back IO Features
The back panel of the Z270x Gaming 5 is well-equipped with a variety of ports:
- **Hybrid PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard Port:** Ideal for users of mechanical keyboards like the IBM Model M.
- **USB 2.0 and USB 3.1 Gen 2 Ports:** The motherboard includes two USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports (one Type A, one Type C) for fast data transfers.
- **HDMI and DisplayPort:** These are wired to the integrated GPU for connectivity with external displays.
- **Network Adapters:** The board features both Intel and Killer Ethernet E2500 controllers for reliable network performance.
The Z270x Gaming 5 also includes four internal USB 2.0 headers for peripherals, as well as front panel audio connectors and diagnostic LEDs for monitoring system health.
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### RGB Fusion App and Aesthetics
The video emphasizes the importance of showcasing the motherboard's features in a build. The RGB lighting options are particularly highlighted, with the narrator suggesting that users pair the Z270x Gaming 5 with a case featuring side windows or transparent panels to fully appreciate its design. The optional white shroud is also mentioned as a favorite configuration for achieving a sleek black-and-white aesthetic.
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### UEFI and Linux Compatibility
The motherboard's UEFI interface is described as minimalistic yet functional, with straightforward options for enabling overclocking and XMP profiles. While it lacks some of the more elaborate wizards found in other motherboards, its simplicity makes it user-friendly. The video also notes that the Z270x Gaming 5 performs well under Linux, with no major compatibility issues reported.
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### Conclusion
Overall, the Gigabyte Z270x Gaming 5 is praised for its balance of features and value. While it may not be the top-of-the-line motherboard for every enthusiast, it offers excellent RGB customization, robust cooling options, and solid performance for both gaming and overclocking. Whether you're building a high-end PC or looking for an affordable option with plenty of bells and whistles, the Z270x Gaming 5 is worth considering.
The video concludes by encouraging viewers to share their experiences with the motherboard in forums, helping others make informed decisions when building their own systems. The narrator also hints at plans to visit the Gigabyte factory where this motherboard was made, offering a behind-the-scenes look at its production process.
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This article provides a detailed breakdown of the key features and capabilities of the Gigabyte Z270x Gaming 5 motherboard, giving readers an comprehensive understanding of what it offers.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ena serpent guard an orus guard and a satesh guard meet on a neutral Planet the situation is tense the serpent guard's eyes Flash the orus guard's beak glistens And the satesh guard's nose drips Horus wait no orus the orus z270x gaming 5 is it wrong that I Delight so much in these things we're going to take a peek let's take a peek this is a z270 base motherboard that's socket 1151 compatible with Skylake and kbl Lake CPUs so kbl like has just been released by Intel at least at the time of the creation of this video so we're talking about i7 7700k you know the I5 kbl I5 I3 i3k all of that stuff this motherboard is designed with a z270 chipset this is the z270x gaming 5 so it's kind of the middle of the road motherboard from gigabyte I mean it's designed for enthusiasts so it's got a lot of Enthusiast features but you know at the very top end of the Spectrum in terms of the motherboards the gigabot is providing around the z270 chipset uh you can get a motherboard that's got a built-in EK water block for cooling and has a lot of other higher-end features well this is the gaming five let's get the RGB stuff out of the way so it comes with an RGB app that lets you control the different RGB zones there's also instead of like the RGB header that most motherboards have this has got rgbw what rgbw is is a five pin header instead of a four pin header you can still use a four pin LED strip if you want but uh you know some people have noticed that when you combine red green and blue on an LED strip you don't necessarily get white on in terms of the light output so there are some Led strips that are having you know RGB LEDs and then white LEDs and then an RGB LED and then a white LED and so of course there's another control line for that um for whenever you want to display white you get a pure more white looking white I guess and this motherboard has support for the rgbw LEDs it also comes with Windows software for controlling the different LED zones controlling the output header uh there's another version of this motherboard that actually has multiple header outputs so that you can use multiple RGB or rgbw LED strips with your with your motherboard if that's your thing there's accented Lighting on the ram there's accented lighting around the vrm componentry there's accented Lighting on the armored PCI Express slots there are three PCI Express by 16 slots it's by 16 by 8 and by four so you can run the the the configuration is by 16 nothing by4 through the DMI or by 8 by8 directly to the CPU and then by four through the DMI it also supports triple nvme raid through one u.2 device and two nvme devices it's got two uh m.2 ports on the motherboard one of which is uh 22 110 so it would support 110 mm m.2 devices four Ram Slots of course ddr4 um supports DDR are for up to 4,000 according to the documentation U the boards are certified for overclocks I'm not personally been experiencing overclocks this fast but I've seen preliminary documentation and support um for these that show you know an i7 7700k overclock in the 5.4 GHz range so yeah you can get 5.4 GHz assuming you have a unicorn CPU that will go that high I have a CPU that will go to 5 GHz I was able to get it to 5 GHz on this board without any trouble just going to the U fi changing the multiplier plugging in some values for the voltage and other stuff that I basically knew the CPU needed I was a little disappointed that there wasn't as much help in the automatic overclocking Department in the ufi on the gaming 5 as I've seen on other motherboards but the gaming 5 is sort of a middle of the road board and overclocking on KB lake is pretty easy so I don't know that you're missing out on all that much this accent overlay in the front is also swappable so you could you know make your own or get a different pattern uh that you might use for for RGB lighting and that will be fine the name of the Windows app is the RGB Fusion app the RGB Fusion app supports a bunch of different modes of operation it can operate based on your music like the pulse to the music or the sound that your computer's making it can do color cycling uh it can be static you can do flash mode random wave intelligent whatever uh you can also make it respond to different conditions in the system the computer has five four pin fan headers two of which support two amps of draw so you can run water pumps pump or really high-end configuration in terms of your fan control that is a a pwm and DC hybrid and you can control the fans through smart fan5 now the motherboard has several thermal zones as well there's a bunch of thermal sensors scattered all around the the motherboard and also an external temperature sensor and you can use those thermal zones to control the different fans that you have in the system in terms of like fan RPM and fan control and things like that so my testing overall it's been a pretty solid board it is a pretty good value for what it is if you're going to get this board you really should show it off in in a case with a side window or something like that if that's your thing and that's what you're into then you can definitely achieve some very interesting looks with this particular motherboard in terms of the RGB control it is one of the fancier setups that I've seen as far as giving you control and flexibility and and and pretty polished Windows software for being able to control your your RGB lighting and your RGB controller and that sort of thing again z270 chipset designed for kbl Lake it's also backr compatible with Skylake so if you got a Skylake CPU you can plug it in there no problem it's completely fine let's take a look at the back IO all right on the back we've got a hybrid PS2 mouse keyboard Port that's great for people like me that are running the IBM model m keyboard we've got two usb2 Dack up ports these ports have a separate isolated stabilized power supply so if you're running an external USB audio deck then this will provide clean DC power for an external audio jack then we've got our HDMI and display port ports which are wired into the the igpu on the on the CPU that you you might happen to be running we've got our two USB 3.1 Gen 2 uh ports this is provided through an as media controller one is type A one is Type C then we've got our two network adapters one is Intel and one is the killer ethernet E2500 just below that we've got two usb2 ports and two usb3 ports now the usb3 ports here are provided by the chipset but since it's z270 those are USB 3.1 ports and I'm going to say this just in case it's colored wrong because I don't actually have the manual for this but I'm really surprising that all four ports are not USB 3 at the back just below your other ethernet adapter are two more USB 3.1 ports provided by the z270 chipset yes that's USB 3.1 10 GB per second incorporated into the z270 that's a change from z170 so what do you know and then you've got your sound blaster audio solution you do have Optical SPD F out goldplated audio connectors now this is a sound blaster XF mb5 that's based around the realtech alc 12 20 but it is 120 DB signal noise ratio implementation so it's got a smart headphone amp as well and configurable gain dip switch on the motherboard so you can configure if you want to do a gain of 2.5x or or a gain of of 5x so if you're into Sound Blaster and you're looking for Sound Blaster xfi m85 well it's on the motherboard on this the audio deck is also user replaceable it's a socketed 8 pen chip so you could replace the amp with something else some other type of amplifier a higher quality amplifier if you want you can replace the audio amplifier uh by just removing the Chip And replacing it you're good to go another overclocking feature of this motherboard is that it does have an external base clock generator so with this motherboard you can generate a base clock from 90 to 500 MHz you know the the built-in Intel base clock generator is is typically 100 133 166 but with this you can basically set anything if you're going for a very fast base clock uh for your CPU as part of your overclocking strategy for your for your CPU so just keep that in mind that this motherboard does actually have an external base clock generator which is a nice feature to have if you're messing with the base clock for your overclocking on your CPU in addition to the three PCI Express by 16 slots I mentioned before there are also 3x one slots which are wired through the DMI so that you can use by one peripherals like addin NYX you know capture cards things like that it's a nice feature along the bottom edge of the motherboard you've got your front panel audio connector which is on an isolated part of the printed circuit board and digital spdif output you this little LED demo header what's that for well it'll Supply external power just for the LED parts of the board so if this is part of a display or you're wanted to show off the the LED Parts Only the LED parts of the motherboard will run so that's nice that that's isolated then you got your rgbw header then you've got your TPM header then you've got your uh USB 2.0 Port one and two so you've got four internal USB 2.0 headers for any peripherals that you might be running inside the case then you've got your diagnostic code readout LEDs and there's a cluster are four LEDs that are surface mounted on the printed circuit board and these these four LEDs will tell you if there's a problem with the VGA card the addin VGA card or you know your built-in VGA whatever the CPU the boot device or the RAM and so just at a glance you can see if there's a problem then at the bottom edge of the board there's a four pin fan water pump header then you've got your front panel connector along the front edge of the motherboard we've got three SATA Express connections or six SATA 6 connections if you want to use the connections that way then we've got our front panel us 3 headers now there should be USB 3.1 from the z270 chipset but the printed circuit board is actually labeled fusb 3.0 so I'm not sure about that going I have to test that there's two zones on the PCB that show you XMP and turbo for the different modes that the motherboard will operate in this motherboard does have gigabyte dual bios so you can toggle between a primary and a secondary bios for when you're updating one of the USB ports on the back does also support updating the BIOS even without a CPU so if you get this motherboard and there's another CPU that comes out later that this mother board supports but the UEFI wasn't up to date you can fully up toate this if you get this motherboard I strongly recommend immediately updating the UEFI as I do with pretty much everything since Haswell um you know z270 and the kbl lake CPUs is a refresh it's not unlike the Devil's Canyon Haswell refresh from that cycle um if you're not familiar with the the computer history of that it's not not really a big deal Sky Lake KB Lake clock for clock they're really about the same speed speed um kbl lake is a little bit faster in terms of clock speed but in terms of instructions per clock and how much work the CPU does per each cycle they're basically the same so a Skylake i7 is clocked at 4 GHz uh for the for the higher end i7 part kbl L's clocked at 4.2 GHz so it's going to be a little bit faster just because it's clocked faster but you know in terms of like game changing whatever it's really not any different than what Intel has done in the past in terms of you know updating the CPU families like you know when when Haswell came out then they released you know Devil's Canyon which was had some tweaks and some stuff to help overclockers and so z270 is really more about better peripheral connectivity more peripheral connectivity built-in support for USB 3.1 in the z270 chipset all that kind of stuff so it's really about the peripherals it's really about adding in now this does support nvme raid so you could run raid zero with nvme but as a general recommendation I'm going to recommend that you just get a higher-end nvme you can easily get an nvme that can do 2 GB per second Plus on the read speed no problem instead of fiddling with raid zero just get a faster nvme instead of getting multiple slower nvmes just just get a faster nvme the connection between the DMI and CPU is still only about four PCI Express Lanes worth of bandwidth that's an Intel chipset limitation that's not really that's not not a problem with the motherboard or anything like that it's just Intel so overall though in terms of the features and the connectivity and stuff like that this motherboard offers it's doing pretty well I'm surprised that there are three SATA Express ports you know there have been some kbl Lake motherboards that have completely ued SATA Express altogether and I'll be honest I really haven't seen that many SATA Express peripherals there are some Oddball SATA Express peripherals out there there's a USB 3.1 controller that you can deploy in a 5 and a qu inch Drive Bay that plugs in Via SATA Express which is pretty neat I mean that's that's pretty cool but beyond that I really haven't seen any say Express peripherals that do anything now it does have a u.2 port so you can run nvme like the Intel nvme which is really nice and then of course it's got RGB so if you're going to build a system to show it off you've totally got that it's also got this nice uh White shroud that goes with it and I'll be honest that my favorite RGB LED configuration for this motherboard just make the whole thing white when you do that you got a nice black and white color scheme I think that works for the motherboard it works well so honestly the UEFI itself is a little surprising it's pretty minimalistic you know as we look through and go through the screens here in the UEFI um there's doesn't really seem to be as many screens as I'm seeing on other boards from this generation but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing it seems like gigabyte has gone the extra mile to sort of organize and clean up Superfluous and redundant options in the UEFI I was really expecting to have trouble overclocking because you know in some of the other UEFI there there's a lot of wizards and things like that that would help you overclock there is an OC button next to the ram turning on the XMP profile was as simple as actually selecting the XMP and just setting it on uh it wasn't in 12 different places like I've seen in some ufi but overall the UEFI experience did actually work I found a CPU level up area in the UEFI I set it to 5 GHz and just hit reboot didn't look at the settings didn't tweak anything and it worked now I don't really think that that for me I'm going to want to tweak it I'm going to want to go in and see if I can lower the voltage minimize the Heat and for KB like good Lord you're going to need a close loop all in one cooler if you're overclocking it that far because it generates a ton of heat when you take it past 5 GHz so you're going to want a good closed loop cooler you might be able to get away with good air cooler but I'm going to recommend for the general population closed loop all inone you can do custom Loop if you want but it's a little more expensive but get a good cooler for your CPU and make sure that it's fastened on there really well but overall the UEFI was pretty good I you know I almost looked over the CPU overclocking option because it's just it's right there it's not you know the big giant Blinky button that I've seen in other stuff so overall for the UEFI I think I'll give it an a it's it's preliminary I haven't had a chance to play with it I'm going to reserve final judgment until I've got a little bit more time clocked with this motherboard but overall I'm I'm pretty impressed with how minimalistic it is but functional it remains I almost overlooked the fan controls as well gigabytes added full fan control in the UEFI for the thermal zones and fan control fan profile speeds the whole nine yards so that is there in the ufi as well if you're going to run an alternative operating system you totally can do that so as I'm working through this thing and putting it together it occurs to me I've been to the place where this is made the nanping factory um my Gigabyte factory tour video which hopefully I'll remember to link but I was there I saw this thing being made so I probably occupied the space where this motherboard was put together this is may be a prototype or an early release so maybe that's not true but in terms of like production of this kind of motherboard I was there and so if you want to see the factory where this thing was made where I was 6 or eight months ago you should totally go check that out because it was pretty neat I really had a good time you didn't think I forgot about testing Linux did you n we tested Linux I've got a SATA boot disc booted off USB z270 pretty much worked out of the box I mean you kind of you don't really expect a lot of Linux compatibility issues with z270 because z270 is really just a refresh it's not groundbreaking Earth shattering new technology so the testing in Linux is pretty minimal it's does the igpu work does the igpu work as advertised does the audio work does the network work well this motherboard's got a built-in Intel Nick so the Intel Nick was fine the uh display controller was fine and the audio worked so overall on Linux I got no complaints I was pretty impressed with the the overclocking capabilities it's a really impressive motherboard for the price point and for the value that it delivers there so if RGB is not your thing then you might look at a different model motherboard or if you want to do Clos Loop water cooling or custom Loop water cooling you might look at one of the higher end boards overall not too bad if you get one of these let us know your feedback you know good experience or bad comment in the forums and let us know so that everybody's got more data for when they go to buy one of these things if they build a new system or they do whatever I'm wle I'm signing out I'll see you next timea serpent guard an orus guard and a satesh guard meet on a neutral Planet the situation is tense the serpent guard's eyes Flash the orus guard's beak glistens And the satesh guard's nose drips Horus wait no orus the orus z270x gaming 5 is it wrong that I Delight so much in these things we're going to take a peek let's take a peek this is a z270 base motherboard that's socket 1151 compatible with Skylake and kbl Lake CPUs so kbl like has just been released by Intel at least at the time of the creation of this video so we're talking about i7 7700k you know the I5 kbl I5 I3 i3k all of that stuff this motherboard is designed with a z270 chipset this is the z270x gaming 5 so it's kind of the middle of the road motherboard from gigabyte I mean it's designed for enthusiasts so it's got a lot of Enthusiast features but you know at the very top end of the Spectrum in terms of the motherboards the gigabot is providing around the z270 chipset uh you can get a motherboard that's got a built-in EK water block for cooling and has a lot of other higher-end features well this is the gaming five let's get the RGB stuff out of the way so it comes with an RGB app that lets you control the different RGB zones there's also instead of like the RGB header that most motherboards have this has got rgbw what rgbw is is a five pin header instead of a four pin header you can still use a four pin LED strip if you want but uh you know some people have noticed that when you combine red green and blue on an LED strip you don't necessarily get white on in terms of the light output so there are some Led strips that are having you know RGB LEDs and then white LEDs and then an RGB LED and then a white LED and so of course there's another control line for that um for whenever you want to display white you get a pure more white looking white I guess and this motherboard has support for the rgbw LEDs it also comes with Windows software for controlling the different LED zones controlling the output header uh there's another version of this motherboard that actually has multiple header outputs so that you can use multiple RGB or rgbw LED strips with your with your motherboard if that's your thing there's accented Lighting on the ram there's accented lighting around the vrm componentry there's accented Lighting on the armored PCI Express slots there are three PCI Express by 16 slots it's by 16 by 8 and by four so you can run the the the configuration is by 16 nothing by4 through the DMI or by 8 by8 directly to the CPU and then by four through the DMI it also supports triple nvme raid through one u.2 device and two nvme devices it's got two uh m.2 ports on the motherboard one of which is uh 22 110 so it would support 110 mm m.2 devices four Ram Slots of course ddr4 um supports DDR are for up to 4,000 according to the documentation U the boards are certified for overclocks I'm not personally been experiencing overclocks this fast but I've seen preliminary documentation and support um for these that show you know an i7 7700k overclock in the 5.4 GHz range so yeah you can get 5.4 GHz assuming you have a unicorn CPU that will go that high I have a CPU that will go to 5 GHz I was able to get it to 5 GHz on this board without any trouble just going to the U fi changing the multiplier plugging in some values for the voltage and other stuff that I basically knew the CPU needed I was a little disappointed that there wasn't as much help in the automatic overclocking Department in the ufi on the gaming 5 as I've seen on other motherboards but the gaming 5 is sort of a middle of the road board and overclocking on KB lake is pretty easy so I don't know that you're missing out on all that much this accent overlay in the front is also swappable so you could you know make your own or get a different pattern uh that you might use for for RGB lighting and that will be fine the name of the Windows app is the RGB Fusion app the RGB Fusion app supports a bunch of different modes of operation it can operate based on your music like the pulse to the music or the sound that your computer's making it can do color cycling uh it can be static you can do flash mode random wave intelligent whatever uh you can also make it respond to different conditions in the system the computer has five four pin fan headers two of which support two amps of draw so you can run water pumps pump or really high-end configuration in terms of your fan control that is a a pwm and DC hybrid and you can control the fans through smart fan5 now the motherboard has several thermal zones as well there's a bunch of thermal sensors scattered all around the the motherboard and also an external temperature sensor and you can use those thermal zones to control the different fans that you have in the system in terms of like fan RPM and fan control and things like that so my testing overall it's been a pretty solid board it is a pretty good value for what it is if you're going to get this board you really should show it off in in a case with a side window or something like that if that's your thing and that's what you're into then you can definitely achieve some very interesting looks with this particular motherboard in terms of the RGB control it is one of the fancier setups that I've seen as far as giving you control and flexibility and and and pretty polished Windows software for being able to control your your RGB lighting and your RGB controller and that sort of thing again z270 chipset designed for kbl Lake it's also backr compatible with Skylake so if you got a Skylake CPU you can plug it in there no problem it's completely fine let's take a look at the back IO all right on the back we've got a hybrid PS2 mouse keyboard Port that's great for people like me that are running the IBM model m keyboard we've got two usb2 Dack up ports these ports have a separate isolated stabilized power supply so if you're running an external USB audio deck then this will provide clean DC power for an external audio jack then we've got our HDMI and display port ports which are wired into the the igpu on the on the CPU that you you might happen to be running we've got our two USB 3.1 Gen 2 uh ports this is provided through an as media controller one is type A one is Type C then we've got our two network adapters one is Intel and one is the killer ethernet E2500 just below that we've got two usb2 ports and two usb3 ports now the usb3 ports here are provided by the chipset but since it's z270 those are USB 3.1 ports and I'm going to say this just in case it's colored wrong because I don't actually have the manual for this but I'm really surprising that all four ports are not USB 3 at the back just below your other ethernet adapter are two more USB 3.1 ports provided by the z270 chipset yes that's USB 3.1 10 GB per second incorporated into the z270 that's a change from z170 so what do you know and then you've got your sound blaster audio solution you do have Optical SPD F out goldplated audio connectors now this is a sound blaster XF mb5 that's based around the realtech alc 12 20 but it is 120 DB signal noise ratio implementation so it's got a smart headphone amp as well and configurable gain dip switch on the motherboard so you can configure if you want to do a gain of 2.5x or or a gain of of 5x so if you're into Sound Blaster and you're looking for Sound Blaster xfi m85 well it's on the motherboard on this the audio deck is also user replaceable it's a socketed 8 pen chip so you could replace the amp with something else some other type of amplifier a higher quality amplifier if you want you can replace the audio amplifier uh by just removing the Chip And replacing it you're good to go another overclocking feature of this motherboard is that it does have an external base clock generator so with this motherboard you can generate a base clock from 90 to 500 MHz you know the the built-in Intel base clock generator is is typically 100 133 166 but with this you can basically set anything if you're going for a very fast base clock uh for your CPU as part of your overclocking strategy for your for your CPU so just keep that in mind that this motherboard does actually have an external base clock generator which is a nice feature to have if you're messing with the base clock for your overclocking on your CPU in addition to the three PCI Express by 16 slots I mentioned before there are also 3x one slots which are wired through the DMI so that you can use by one peripherals like addin NYX you know capture cards things like that it's a nice feature along the bottom edge of the motherboard you've got your front panel audio connector which is on an isolated part of the printed circuit board and digital spdif output you this little LED demo header what's that for well it'll Supply external power just for the LED parts of the board so if this is part of a display or you're wanted to show off the the LED Parts Only the LED parts of the motherboard will run so that's nice that that's isolated then you got your rgbw header then you've got your TPM header then you've got your uh USB 2.0 Port one and two so you've got four internal USB 2.0 headers for any peripherals that you might be running inside the case then you've got your diagnostic code readout LEDs and there's a cluster are four LEDs that are surface mounted on the printed circuit board and these these four LEDs will tell you if there's a problem with the VGA card the addin VGA card or you know your built-in VGA whatever the CPU the boot device or the RAM and so just at a glance you can see if there's a problem then at the bottom edge of the board there's a four pin fan water pump header then you've got your front panel connector along the front edge of the motherboard we've got three SATA Express connections or six SATA 6 connections if you want to use the connections that way then we've got our front panel us 3 headers now there should be USB 3.1 from the z270 chipset but the printed circuit board is actually labeled fusb 3.0 so I'm not sure about that going I have to test that there's two zones on the PCB that show you XMP and turbo for the different modes that the motherboard will operate in this motherboard does have gigabyte dual bios so you can toggle between a primary and a secondary bios for when you're updating one of the USB ports on the back does also support updating the BIOS even without a CPU so if you get this motherboard and there's another CPU that comes out later that this mother board supports but the UEFI wasn't up to date you can fully up toate this if you get this motherboard I strongly recommend immediately updating the UEFI as I do with pretty much everything since Haswell um you know z270 and the kbl lake CPUs is a refresh it's not unlike the Devil's Canyon Haswell refresh from that cycle um if you're not familiar with the the computer history of that it's not not really a big deal Sky Lake KB Lake clock for clock they're really about the same speed speed um kbl lake is a little bit faster in terms of clock speed but in terms of instructions per clock and how much work the CPU does per each cycle they're basically the same so a Skylake i7 is clocked at 4 GHz uh for the for the higher end i7 part kbl L's clocked at 4.2 GHz so it's going to be a little bit faster just because it's clocked faster but you know in terms of like game changing whatever it's really not any different than what Intel has done in the past in terms of you know updating the CPU families like you know when when Haswell came out then they released you know Devil's Canyon which was had some tweaks and some stuff to help overclockers and so z270 is really more about better peripheral connectivity more peripheral connectivity built-in support for USB 3.1 in the z270 chipset all that kind of stuff so it's really about the peripherals it's really about adding in now this does support nvme raid so you could run raid zero with nvme but as a general recommendation I'm going to recommend that you just get a higher-end nvme you can easily get an nvme that can do 2 GB per second Plus on the read speed no problem instead of fiddling with raid zero just get a faster nvme instead of getting multiple slower nvmes just just get a faster nvme the connection between the DMI and CPU is still only about four PCI Express Lanes worth of bandwidth that's an Intel chipset limitation that's not really that's not not a problem with the motherboard or anything like that it's just Intel so overall though in terms of the features and the connectivity and stuff like that this motherboard offers it's doing pretty well I'm surprised that there are three SATA Express ports you know there have been some kbl Lake motherboards that have completely ued SATA Express altogether and I'll be honest I really haven't seen that many SATA Express peripherals there are some Oddball SATA Express peripherals out there there's a USB 3.1 controller that you can deploy in a 5 and a qu inch Drive Bay that plugs in Via SATA Express which is pretty neat I mean that's that's pretty cool but beyond that I really haven't seen any say Express peripherals that do anything now it does have a u.2 port so you can run nvme like the Intel nvme which is really nice and then of course it's got RGB so if you're going to build a system to show it off you've totally got that it's also got this nice uh White shroud that goes with it and I'll be honest that my favorite RGB LED configuration for this motherboard just make the whole thing white when you do that you got a nice black and white color scheme I think that works for the motherboard it works well so honestly the UEFI itself is a little surprising it's pretty minimalistic you know as we look through and go through the screens here in the UEFI um there's doesn't really seem to be as many screens as I'm seeing on other boards from this generation but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing it seems like gigabyte has gone the extra mile to sort of organize and clean up Superfluous and redundant options in the UEFI I was really expecting to have trouble overclocking because you know in some of the other UEFI there there's a lot of wizards and things like that that would help you overclock there is an OC button next to the ram turning on the XMP profile was as simple as actually selecting the XMP and just setting it on uh it wasn't in 12 different places like I've seen in some ufi but overall the UEFI experience did actually work I found a CPU level up area in the UEFI I set it to 5 GHz and just hit reboot didn't look at the settings didn't tweak anything and it worked now I don't really think that that for me I'm going to want to tweak it I'm going to want to go in and see if I can lower the voltage minimize the Heat and for KB like good Lord you're going to need a close loop all in one cooler if you're overclocking it that far because it generates a ton of heat when you take it past 5 GHz so you're going to want a good closed loop cooler you might be able to get away with good air cooler but I'm going to recommend for the general population closed loop all inone you can do custom Loop if you want but it's a little more expensive but get a good cooler for your CPU and make sure that it's fastened on there really well but overall the UEFI was pretty good I you know I almost looked over the CPU overclocking option because it's just it's right there it's not you know the big giant Blinky button that I've seen in other stuff so overall for the UEFI I think I'll give it an a it's it's preliminary I haven't had a chance to play with it I'm going to reserve final judgment until I've got a little bit more time clocked with this motherboard but overall I'm I'm pretty impressed with how minimalistic it is but functional it remains I almost overlooked the fan controls as well gigabytes added full fan control in the UEFI for the thermal zones and fan control fan profile speeds the whole nine yards so that is there in the ufi as well if you're going to run an alternative operating system you totally can do that so as I'm working through this thing and putting it together it occurs to me I've been to the place where this is made the nanping factory um my Gigabyte factory tour video which hopefully I'll remember to link but I was there I saw this thing being made so I probably occupied the space where this motherboard was put together this is may be a prototype or an early release so maybe that's not true but in terms of like production of this kind of motherboard I was there and so if you want to see the factory where this thing was made where I was 6 or eight months ago you should totally go check that out because it was pretty neat I really had a good time you didn't think I forgot about testing Linux did you n we tested Linux I've got a SATA boot disc booted off USB z270 pretty much worked out of the box I mean you kind of you don't really expect a lot of Linux compatibility issues with z270 because z270 is really just a refresh it's not groundbreaking Earth shattering new technology so the testing in Linux is pretty minimal it's does the igpu work does the igpu work as advertised does the audio work does the network work well this motherboard's got a built-in Intel Nick so the Intel Nick was fine the uh display controller was fine and the audio worked so overall on Linux I got no complaints I was pretty impressed with the the overclocking capabilities it's a really impressive motherboard for the price point and for the value that it delivers there so if RGB is not your thing then you might look at a different model motherboard or if you want to do Clos Loop water cooling or custom Loop water cooling you might look at one of the higher end boards overall not too bad if you get one of these let us know your feedback you know good experience or bad comment in the forums and let us know so that everybody's got more data for when they go to buy one of these things if they build a new system or they do whatever I'm wle I'm signing out I'll see you next time\n"