Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 - Looking for reviews, user testimonials!

lazz

lazz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 15, 2007
Messages
324
If [H]ers have purchased this mobo, I'd love to hear about your experiences and thoughts regarding it.

Also, if anyone finds any review links I'd be very interested in them.
 
I just purchased it today (along with several parts for my new build). I picked up an i7-6700K. Hopefully everything will install without a hitch.
 
officermartinez said:
I just purchased it today (along with several parts for my new build). I picked up an i7-6700K. Hopefully everything will install without a hitch.
Click to expand...

Awesome! Looking at the price point, it seems the best choice. I'm just concerned with some previous experiences with less than stellar UEFI implementations from Gigabyte.

I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts on the board, if you wouldn't mind posting them.
 
Got mine up and running with two SM951 M.2 SSDs in RAID0 right now - but confused as to why Crystal is showing "only" 2200MB/sec - I was expecting 4000+.

It's sitting on the other desk right now and not in a case (the case is in the garage still in its box) but the specs are:

Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7
6700k
16GB Ballistix DDR4 2400
2x Samsung SM951 PCIe M.2 SSDs in RAID0
ASUS GTX 970 OC
CoolerMaster Hyper 212 cooler
Corsair RM1000 - massive overkill but I got it cheap when Tiger Direct was going out of business

I'll post back here with further experience - any thoughts on my SSD RAID throughput or how to figure out why I'm only seeing about half of what I expected welcomed! :)
 
So far, so good, I am loving it! The cpu upgrade for overclocking is working great at 4.6Ghz and the system is overall faster than my FX 8350 system I was using. (It think that is partially because this board has a much newer chipset and features than the 990FX does.) Manually overclocking is going to be a long learning process for me since I am mostly used to AMD overclocking.
 
Whelp, I went ahead and grabbed on. I've got it running the F5e beta BIOS, but it seems perfectly stable. Right now my 6700k is getting an initial burn-in, going to give it 72 hours stability before I start to OC.

Regarding the board, it's definitely met my expectations so far. I love, love, love the clean, almost throwback UEFI interface. Not a single issue so far in the setup (regarding the board anyways).
 
I've now spent several days thoroughly floundering around with getting two 256GB SM951 M.2 SSDs configured in RAID0 on this motherboard. Don't do what I did! :p

Short version of my several days: The SM951 is fast - so fast in fact that putting two of them together in RAID0 didn't get the gain I thought it should in CrystalDiskMark...

Here's a result with an SM951 (no RAID) in the "H" slot on the motherboard:


and the "D" slot:


Here's the two SM951 in RAID0 using Intel RST via the BIOS:


SM951 on a Lycom DT-120 PCI card in the x8 PCI slot:


Software RAID0 - one SM951 in the "H" slot on the motherboard, the other in a Lycom DT-120 PCI card in the x8 PCI slot:


The main thing I was shooting for was the top left number - sequential reads - just because I thought 4k here seemed good. Turns out in order to get there, you cannot have both drives on the PCI lanes provided by the Z170 chipset Platform Controller Hub (PCH.) Those lanes are limited by DMI 3.0. To get around the "limitation" you must put at least one of the drives onto the PCI lanes outside the PCH and in doing so, you cannot use Intel Rapid Storage Technology BIOS to create a RAID array because the IRST doesn't see anything not inside the PCH as far as I can tell. This means you cannot create a bootable RAID array. You can create a software RAID array but that isn't what I wanted at all.

I think I will use the two SM951s in RAID0 in the M.2 slots on the motherboard. There are gains - and I'd prefer to aggregate their capacity together. Had I known then when I know now, I'd probably have just bought a 512GB SM951 and used that. Don't do what I did! :p

Everything is plenty fast and I doubt I'd have noticed the difference had the benchmark shown what I expected right off the bat anyway. The SM951 is FAR faster than my 840EVO SSD and that's noticeable.
 
Update: System running happily along, fully replaced old setup and driving four monitors.

There is a bug in the Gigabyte app center System Information Viewer (SIV) with multiple monitors apparently... When you bring up SIV, it shows a tabbed display with System Information/Smart Fan Auto/Smart Fan Advanced/System Alert/Record. Looks fine on single monitor or multiple monitors.

When you click on Hardware Monitor in the title bar of this app, it changes view to a long narrow window that displays voltages & sensor data - or rather it does this on a single display. When I do it on my 3 x 1 + 1 display above setup the window gets placed off screen someplace. You can tell this is happening because the icon for the window is in the title bar but it can't be found anywhere. Further, if you highlight the window and hit <ALT><Spacebar> and just try to move it that doesn't work - not entirely sure why. If you hit <ALT><Spacebar> it'll pop up (at least in my case) the menu to move/resize/minimize/maximize in the top right hand corner of my right most display. If I click maximize, I then see the sensor data window maximized.

If I then click on the title bar and drag it anyplace, the window resizes to the long/narrow format and you can put it where you want. It doesn't save the window position and every time you want to bring it up you have to do this dance which is silly.

They seem to have monkeyed with the window properties of the window they create such that this happens on a multi-display setup. I might get around to reporting it to them or maybe they'll figure it out on their own. It's not a major issue - and you can get the sensor data up, albeit with way too many steps. You can also just use some other software to watch that data.

Overall VERY happy with the new system and the motherboard. I've played games for hours on end, never seen temps get too high - PCH is always the hottest thing at idle at anywhere from 40c to 47c but from Google it looks like PCH always runs hot. I've got 4 fans running at around 600rpm in various locations and the CPU fan runs at 1800rpm and nothing is noisy enough for me to notice. I'm using nearly default BIOS settings other than using the speediest boot option with least USB support until everything is booted and the stuff to get RAID setup. Haven't messed with memory timings or overclocking other than for a few minutes and then went back to stock. It's plenty fast! :)
 
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