Skylake-Based Z170 Gaming Mini ITX Motherboard

TCWORLD said:
777 I have just bought the GA-Z170N-Gaming 5 as well based on this thread and its suspected Thunderbolt 3 capabilities.

I upgraded the BIOS to version F4 and there is an option at the bottom of one of the "BIOS Features" menu which is called "TBT USB3.1 Force Power". I enabled that option and rebooted.

Installed the Thunderbolt driver and boom:

View attachment 1962

The one thing I haven't done is the USB 3.1 FW Update. Comparing the Gaming 7 ATX boards, they seem to have a Thunderbolt FW Update which is version B16.0201.1, whereas the Gaming 5 ITX board has a USB 3.1 FW Update version B16.0315.1. In the description they say "Firmware 16 + TI 1.7" for the G7, whereas just "Firmware 16" for the G5. Without knowing what that "TI 1.7" bit stands for, I decided not to do the update.

The update seems to be a firmware upgrade for the AR chip itself. You need the Thunderbolt driver installed to do the upgrade, which explains why they released the driver for the G5. But if as you say you are not seeing TB after upgrading it the firmware, part of me wonders if it is Gigabyte (possibly at Intel's request) trying to disable the TB functionality entirely.

See if you can enable the setting in the BIOS I mentioned above and if doing that allows the adapter to show up as above. If it doesn't show up, the I think that USB3.1 FW update must have crippled its TB capabilities.

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As an odd side note, it seems according to lspci for Windows, that the USB3.1/TBT controller is only capable of Gen1 x4, which is odd as it should be doing at Gen3 x2 according to the Gigabyte docs.
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TY! I enabled "force power" in the BIOS and the Thunderbolt device showed up in Device Manager. The screen shown by the other user doesn't seem to exist.

Not having built a new system in a few years, I had forgotten how cryptic the BIOS and software documentation for these asian motherboard makers can be.
 
777 Good news indeed. Shows that the AR firmware update doesn't disable the Thunderbolt.

Out of curiosity, what version numbers does yours show up with (having done the FW update) in the Thunderbolt Settings? (Right-click the thunderbolt icon, select settings, and then click details).

I think the force power bit is being kept quite cryptic as it is not officially certified.
 
TCWORLD said:
777 Good news indeed. Shows that the AR firmware update doesn't disable the Thunderbolt.

Out of curiosity, what version numbers does yours show up with (having done the FW update) in the Thunderbolt Settings? (Right-click the thunderbolt icon, select settings, and then click details).

I think the force power bit is being kept quite cryptic as it is not officially certified.
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My screen shows the same versions as yours except for NVM Firmware version which says 16 instead of 6.
 
Has anyone tried Thunderbolt on GA-Z170N-Gaming 5 after BIOS upgrade to check if it works? I was curious if it will work for video output to Thunderbolt Display.
 
valdos said:
Has anyone tried Thunderbolt on GA-Z170N-Gaming 5 after BIOS upgrade to check if it works? I was curious if it will work for video output to Thunderbolt Display.
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Is the controller on the Gaming 5 even capable of video output via thunderbolt?
 
I think so. That should be an Intel Alpine Ridge controller and I find it likely it is already used for the conversion of the internal GPU's DP signal to HDMI which is one of its several features.
 
any news about thunderbolt 3 anyone? i bought z170n gaming 5 like many, praying for support...
 
Condelio said:
any news about thunderbolt 3 anyone? i bought z170n gaming 5 like many, praying for support...
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Yeah. I'm checking this thread daily to see if anyone tried a TB3 device on the motherboard. Only need a TB3 mini-itx motherboard to finish this build.
 
DrRetina said:
Yeah. I'm checking this thread daily to see if anyone tried a TB3 device on the motherboard. Only need a TB3 mini-itx motherboard to finish this build.
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i already pulled the trigger for this skylake gigabyte mobo (but have not yet bought 6700k), at this time of the year if you can wait for kaby chipset, z270 will surely have better support for tb3 ...
 
Condelio said:
any news about thunderbolt 3 anyone? i bought z170n gaming 5 like many, praying for support...
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DrRetina said:
Yeah. I'm checking this thread daily to see if anyone tried a TB3 device on the motherboard. Only need a TB3 mini-itx motherboard to finish this build.
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I've been wanting to build my computer for the first time and have already bought the computer case that I've wanted, a Corsair 380T (mini-itx). That was in mid December, 2015. I thought that there would be a mini-itx motherboard supporting thunderbolt 3 officially maybe not long afterwards. It is now May 1, 2016. Although there is Computex a month from now (maybe something will be announced then, I know little about computer scene), I don't think I have the patience to wait any longer.
I'm glad y'all discovered about the Gigabyte Z170N Gaming 5 having drivers and stuff, but I'm still nervous since there's no official news/ press release for it and stuff.

I haven't had a true computer of my own in about 3 years, and the last thing I had was from Winter 2010. :(
 
AlphaCananogram said:
I've been wanting to build my computer for the first time and have already bought the computer case that I've wanted, a Corsair 380T (mini-itx). That was in mid December, 2015. I thought that there would be a mini-itx motherboard supporting thunderbolt 3 officially maybe not long afterwards. It is now May 1, 2016. Although there is Computex a month from now (maybe something will be announced then, I know little about computer scene), I don't think I have the patience to wait any longer.
I'm glad y'all discovered about the Gigabyte Z170N Gaming 5 having drivers and stuff, but I'm still nervous since there's no official news/ press release for it and stuff.

I haven't had a true computer of my own in about 3 years, and the last thing I had was from Winter 2010. :(
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all we need is someone with a tb3 capable device to test our mobo... but anyway when more tb3 devices appear maybe we will already be in z370
 
My order on Amazon for the TB to TB3 adapter from StarTech is getting pushed back again and again.. (from early March to mid June atm) .. annoying :/ same for the release of the TB3 dock.
Meanwhile Akitio announced a similar adapter for old TB equipment, model T3T. Unfortunately, they have not mentioned when it will be available.
 
So the the gigabyte z170n has thunderbolt support now, totally sweet! It's a shame there's no tb3 devices to use it with lol. But eventually I'll be able to hook up a Razer core to my Ncase for crossfire vega's because why the hell not lol.
 
Looking for some information on the ASUS MAXIMUS VIII IMPACT Mini-ITX board. It states that the M.2 is already populated with WiFi/Bluetooth but I can't seem to find much in regards to replacing it with a storage M.2. Is it even possible to take the module off the motherboard?
 
Bijiont said:
Looking for some information on the ASUS MAXIMUS VIII IMPACT Mini-ITX board. It states that the M.2 is already populated with WiFi/Bluetooth but I can't seem to find much in regards to replacing it with a storage M.2. Is it even possible to take the module off the motherboard?
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Not all M.2 slots are created equal. The ones used for WiFi modules are E-Key, the ones for storage or usually M-Key. I don't know whether SSDs for E-Key exist. If they do, they might be a bit slower than M-Key ones because E-Key only has 2 PCIe lanes, not 4.
 
iFreilicht said:
Not all M.2 slots are created equal. The ones used for WiFi modules are E-Key, the ones for storage or usually M-Key. I don't know whether SSDs for E-Key exist. If they do, they might be a bit slower than M-Key ones because E-Key only has 2 PCIe lanes, not 4.
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Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much. I knew the difference but was for some reason coming up short on actual resources to state that either the key was different or that it was using M.2 (M) interface but soldered to the board.

Was hoping this was a proprietary deal ASUS was doing which used M. I am obviously out of luck on that front.
 
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I do believe that the M.2 interfaces on MBs that are used for WiFi/BT are specifically for that use. They will not run SSDs. Besides, I am pretty sure they are all set up with the slotted card standing up at 90 degrees from the MB, meaning a 'normal' M.2 SSD would be jutting up from the MB, a 80mm tower…
 
TCWORLD said:
777 I have just bought the GA-Z170N-Gaming 5 as well based on this thread and its suspected Thunderbolt 3 capabilities.

I upgraded the BIOS to version F4 and there is an option at the bottom of one of the "BIOS Features" menu which is called "TBT USB3.1 Force Power". I enabled that option and rebooted.

Installed the Thunderbolt driver and boom:

View attachment 1962

The one thing I haven't done is the USB 3.1 FW Update. Comparing the Gaming 7 ATX boards, they seem to have a Thunderbolt FW Update which is version B16.0201.1, whereas the Gaming 5 ITX board has a USB 3.1 FW Update version B16.0315.1. In the description they say "Firmware 16 + TI 1.7" for the G7, whereas just "Firmware 16" for the G5. Without knowing what that "TI 1.7" bit stands for, I decided not to do the update.

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As an odd side note, it seems according to lspci for Windows, that the USB3.1/TBT controller is only capable of Gen1 x4, which is odd as it should be doing at Gen3 x2 according to the Gigabyte docs.
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HWinfo shows this tho.
 
nehway0912 It's entirely possible that lspci for windows is getting confused and not reporting correctly. But I also tested with the TeleScan PE software which should be advanced enough to not get confused - even that says Gen1x4. I suppose I could have a faulty motherboard, or there is something else in the system slowing it down (I have a Gen3x16 graphics card in there, but that shouldn't make a difference). I'll try downloading HWInfo, see if that reports 3x2.

Edit: Never mind, when I checked the speed, I still hadn't upgraded the firmware to v16. Having just looked again, it does indeed show as Gen3x2. So essentially, make sure you do the firmware upgrade otherwise it doesn't enumerate at full speed.
 
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2 TB ports? I wonder where the second one is?

It sure would be nice to actually test this out on real hardware.

TCWORLD: How are you checking the speed of NVMe? I see that HWINFO seems to know that the drive is NVMe. Where do you check the interface characteristics?
 
q-silver the link speed of the AR controller is shown in nehway0912's screenshot above - it says - Current Link Speed: 8GT/s and Current Width: 2x. 8GT/s is Gen3.0 PCIe.

The intel controller supports two thunderbolt ports (and some motherboards have both), but the Z170N-Gaming 5 only has one connected (the other will be just unreachable unconnected pins under the BGA). It all looks like it should work, just need some TB3 devices to come out.
 
Thanks TCWORLD... OK... I see it now... somehow I thought you were referring to the speed of NVMe rather than the TB interface. My mistake.

All looks good here...as you say... now we just need a few TB3 devices or at the very least, a reasonably priced adapter to the older TB2 devices!
 
Is there a consensus as to which board is better, Gigabyte GA-Z170N-Gaming 5, or Asrock Fatal1ty z170-Gaming?
 
Mannymal Not sure if you'll get a consensus, but I'll give you my though process for the one I chose.

There are essentially four choices - the Asus Z170I Pro Gaming, the Gigabyte GA-Z170N-Gaming 5, the Asrock Fatal1ty z170-Gaming, and the MSI one which I forget the name of. I wouldn't buy an MSI board if you paid me, my personal opinion, so that left 3 contenders for me.

1. The Asrock board looked quite good, especially in the fact that it has a BIOS option to enable PCIe Bifurcation - essentially that means that with the right riser card you can turn the single Gen3x16 slot into two Gen3x8 slots. That would give the possibility of dual graphics. However it is contingent on finding the right riser card which only one company seems to make and they never got back to me when I asked about it. There also comes a point where you have to ask yourself, if you need two PCIe slots, why are you going for a Mini-ITX board in the first place - plus to do the splitting you end up needing a case with four slots (dual-wide graphics cards), at which point you are in mATX land anyway and there are some nice options available which are cheaper than trying to get hold of the riser card. Beyond bifurcation there isn't anything advantageous over the other two options, and while Asrock are improving their image, there is still lots of reports of hit and miss on the quality front.

2. The Asus board was the one I was steering towards before I saw the Gigabyte one. I like Asus boards - every one I've had until now has been Asus (but then again every board I've had until now has been AMD so...). While it does have plentiful USB ports and decent networking and sound capabilities, unlike the Asrock board it only has 4 SATA ports. Yes it has an M.2 as well, but if you want to have a CD drive, mirror raid documents drives, and I already had a SATA SSD, that's all the SATA ports gone which doesn't leave much expansion room. Being tech support for most of my family I frequently end up having to recover files of HDDs here there and everywhere, so wanted a spare SATA port to connect to an front-panel eSATAp port so I can attach HDDs easily. I could have ditched my current SSD and gone with an M.2 one, but that's an additional expense I wanted to spare for now.

3. The Gigabyte board is the one that swayed me in the end. It has 6 SATA ports, so that's not an issue, and it still has an M.2 in case I go down that route later on. It has similar networking capabilities. What it also has which the other ones don't is a level of future proofing in the Intel AR controller. Yes the Asrock has a USB type-c port, it is just a standard USB 3.1 port and nothing more. The Gigabyte board uses the thunderbolt controller, and if that pans out it is big, very big. The expansion possibilities of thunderbolt mean that even though this board doesn't support PCIe bifurcation, it will become possible to use thunderbolt to connect external PCIe cards amongst other things. While the TB is not officially specified, though the BIOS option it is possible to enable it and everything is looking good for it to work. That alone sold it to me. On top of that Gigabyte have probably just as good of a reputation as Asus from a quality stand point, and the board looks pretty smart too.
 
TCWORLD said:
Mannymal Not sure if you'll get a consensus, but I'll give you my though process for the one I chose.

There are essentially four choices - the Asus Z170I Pro Gaming, the Gigabyte GA-Z170N-Gaming 5, the Asrock Fatal1ty z170-Gaming, and the MSI one which I forget the name of. I wouldn't buy an MSI board if you paid me, my personal opinion, so that left 3 contenders for me.

1. The Asrock board looked quite good, especially in the fact that it has a BIOS option to enable PCIe Bifurcation - essentially that means that with the right riser card you can turn the single Gen3x16 slot into two Gen3x8 slots. That would give the possibility of dual graphics. However it is contingent on finding the right riser card which only one company seems to make and they never got back to me when I asked about it. There also comes a point where you have to ask yourself, if you need two PCIe slots, why are you going for a Mini-ITX board in the first place - plus to do the splitting you end up needing a case with four slots (dual-wide graphics cards), at which point you are in mATX land anyway and there are some nice options available which are cheaper than trying to get hold of the riser card. Beyond bifurcation there isn't anything advantageous over the other two options, and while Asrock are improving their image, there is still lots of reports of hit and miss on the quality front.

2. The Asus board was the one I was steering towards before I saw the Gigabyte one. I like Asus boards - every one I've had until now has been Asus (but then again every board I've had until now has been AMD so...). While it does have plentiful USB ports and decent networking and sound capabilities, unlike the Asrock board it only has 4 SATA ports. Yes it has an M.2 as well, but if you want to have a CD drive, mirror raid documents drives, and I already had a SATA SSD, that's all the SATA ports gone which doesn't leave much expansion room. Being tech support for most of my family I frequently end up having to recover files of HDDs here there and everywhere, so wanted a spare SATA port to connect to an front-panel eSATAp port so I can attach HDDs easily. I could have ditched my current SSD and gone with an M.2 one, but that's an additional expense I wanted to spare for now.

3. The Gigabyte board is the one that swayed me in the end. It has 6 SATA ports, so that's not an issue, and it still has an M.2 in case I go down that route later on. It has similar networking capabilities. What it also has which the other ones don't is a level of future proofing in the Intel AR controller. Yes the Asrock has a USB type-c port, it is just a standard USB 3.1 port and nothing more. The Gigabyte board uses the thunderbolt controller, and if that pans out it is big, very big. The expansion possibilities of thunderbolt mean that even though this board doesn't support PCIe bifurcation, it will become possible to use thunderbolt to connect external PCIe cards amongst other things. While the TB is not officially specified, though the BIOS option it is possible to enable it and everything is looking good for it to work. That alone sold it to me. On top of that Gigabyte have probably just as good of a reputation as Asus from a quality stand point, and the board looks pretty smart too.
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Thank you so much for such a thorough reply. The only thing that was holding me back from the Gigabyte is the reviews say its not such a great CPU overclocker. But now I realize that Skywell is so fast that you dont really NEED high overclocks to get the most out of it in games.

The Thunderbolt 3 is definitely a plus, and it seems Gigabytes are recommended for Hackintoshes which I will experiment with. So Gigabyte it is.
 
TCWORLD, Great analysis. I've made the same decision for pretty much the same reasons and bought the Z170N-G5 together with a couple Samsung 950 (M.2 NVMe... one on PCIe), fast Corsair DDR4, an i7 6700 and a HDPlex H1.S case. The system is tiny, absolutely silent and ridiculously fast with both Win10 and Ubuntu. Functional TB3 will be the icing on the cake! As you well noted TB3 is a hugely significant technology!

Mannymal, TonyMac used to recommend Gigabyte boards because they used allot of the same chips as genuine Macs. I've built a couple in the past using GB boards an can confirm that they work VERY well. I do not think that TB3 will be supported quite yet on a Hac but with the new TB3 MacBook Pros coming I do not imagine that it will be very long before the drivers are available.
 
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TB3 on a Hackintosh would be fantastic!

One drawback for the Gigabyte is it has no DisplayPort. It's not a huge deal, but I might wait on the Geforce 1080 situation to settle before buying one, and in the meantime I won't be able to use a 1440p/165hz at full capacity. Not a dealbreaker, they probably had to choose between DP and USB 3.1 C, and they made the right choice.
 
I imagine the display port output from the CPU is connected in to the TB3 controller to allow things like TB3->DisplayPort adapters to be used (and they seem to exist now, though still a little pricey: Thunderbolt 3 to Dual DisplayPort Adapter - 4k 60 Hz). The HDMI port is version 1.4, so it will at least do 1440p/60Hz. I'm using dedicated graphics so wasn't too bothered by the on-board graphics connectivity.
 
To be honest I wosh they had included two more USB 3.0 ports instead of the HDMI. To be fare going with HDMI over DisplayPort was a good choice on Gigabyte's part, most dosplayport monitors also have an HDMI input but very few tv's have dosplayport inputs.
 
Darn you, TCWORLD! I'd boiled it down to the ASUS Z170i Pro Gaming and the ASRock Fatal1ty Gaming Z170... then you had to go and mention thunderbolt support.

I would have been perfectly happy picking up the ASUS Maximus VIII Impact with a USB C jack, but the bright boys didn't slap an M.2 interface on it.

I'm still a bit reluctant about the Gigabyte due to the lower quality power regulation and tiny heatsinks compared to the ASUS and ASRock offerings.

1st world problems are hard.

Also, with the M.2 slot in use, it's a little unclear how many SATA ports are disabled as a result on each board. Anyone know off the top of their head?
 
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The Internal From page 16 of the manual of the Gigabyte board:

If you use a SATA SSD in the M.2 slot, then you lose SATA port 0, but can still use the corresponding SATA Express port in PCIe mode.
If you use a PCIe NVMe SSD in the M.2 slot, you don't lose any connectivity, unless you operate in RAID mode in which case you lose SATA port 5.

Either way you still have one more SATA port than the other two boards.
 
I think it is important to mention that the Gigabyte board has angled SATA connectors on the side, so if you're planning to connect more than 2 SATA drives, make sure that your case has enough space at the front of the board!

With the ASRock board you could also run bifuricated watercooled dual-GPUs in a 3-slot case like the M1 if the riser fits there, so you don't need four slots at all.

Other than that, great write-up, I'd also go for the Gigabyte board if I was in the market right now.
 
Looks like the Gigabyte will work with the Raven RVZ02B I'm leaning towards. I wonder if it'd work in something like the Fractal Node 202 as well?
 
The Internal said:
Looks like the Gigabyte will work with the Raven RVZ02B I'm leaning towards. I wonder if it'd work in something like the Fractal Node 202 as well?
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Why shouldn't it? It perfectly adheres to the ATX Standard Addendum for mini ITX and its side is not obstructed by a large heatsink so the CPU cooler will be able to freely exhaust there.
 
can still use the corresponding SATA Express port in PCIe mode.
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TCWORLD , Interesting... do you happen to know how fast this would run? I wonder if I could get the same performance out of a SATA Express -> PCIe adapter that I get from the single PCIExpress slot that I'm using. In my case I've used a rather expensive ribbon cable with a PCIe card to mount a second NVMe Samsung 950 to ensure that I get 4x PCIe. It would be much cheaper to use a SATA Experss -> PCIe adapter (if they exist).
 
I'm eventually leaning towards the Z170N-Gaming 5 over the AsRock Fatal1ty ITX as well. A question regarding the "terrible fan control" that's brought up every now and then: What does it actually mean? I'm planning to have a i7 6700 (non-k) with a Cryorig C7 and no overclocking whatsoever, so what should I be concerned about with the fan(s)? The chassis (DAN A4) won't be having any other fans (besides the GPU but that doesn't really count here).
 
I fnished my build with the Gigabyte Z170N-Gaming 5. It's an awesome little motherboard. My fears of poor overclocks were unfounded, its running a 6700k at 4.7Ghz like a champ.

So, I installed the Thunderbolt 3 driver, and now have an icon on my taskbar. Has anyone tried a Thunderbolt 3 device on it? What's the story, does it work perfectly, or is it a roughly patched-on feature?
 
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