ASUS ROG Strix Z270I Gaming Review
Published by Luca Rocchi on 28.02.17Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| A closer look at the motherboard lineup from ASUS reveals that the ROG Strix Z270I Gaming is their high-end model with miniITX form factor. Therefore it comes with some really neat features, like for example ASUS's SupremeFX audio solution, Aura RGB Lightning and two M.2 slots as well as a great looking design in general. Sure the ROG Strix Z270I Gaming is a good motherboard but with a price of 196 Euro it's a little more expensive then what could be expected. Although the layout is almost perfect, we would have liked to two of the four SATA ports angled for better cable manaegment. | -
Design - Layout |
||
| Layout | + | - | |
| Overall, the ROG Strix Z270I Gaming's layout has been well thought. As we already mentioned on this page there is a total of four straight SATA ports. On such small motherboards it's not possible to use all the angled SATA connectors, since the memory would have have to be moved closer to the CPU socket. On the other hand we like the fact, that there is an internal USB 3.1 header. Unfortunately there are no practical power- and reset-buttons as well as debug LED but there is a CLR_CMOS button. Again on the plus side we have a steel-reinforced PCI Express Gen3 x16. We liked the position of the CPU socket, which allows for the installation of large air coolers. There were quite a few boards in the past, which had the socket rather close to the PCI Express slot. That meant you had to install a stock cooler or an all-in-one liquid cooler. A quick look at the back I/O panel reveals there are plenty of USB 3.1 as well as USB 3.0 ports, which in combination with the display and network connectors as well as WiFi module make for a good connectivity mix. | - Space around the CPU
socket
|
- No power/reset button and no debug LED - SATA ports not angled | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks results we ran, we see that this board scores 5th. When taking the average of all 2D results, this board comes in 1st out of 24 boards tested. On another note, we had at energy efficiency where this board scores 20th. | - 2D Performance |
- Power consumption | |
| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| The UEFI BIOS gets a black background and there are a few additional red and white design elements. Meanwhile it's almost normal that a BIOS is complete, offering countless features. If you're looking for overclocking options you'll find a great many of them and they are equally practical for novices and extreme overclockers. We always love the pre-defined profiles, which make overclocking quite a bit more efficient. Boosting our CPU to 5.2 GHz was absolutely no problem at all. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The ROG Strix Z270I Gaming is a well equipped Z270 motherboard. This board is also quick accourding to our 2D and 3D benchmarks we're running. At the moment this is the fifth mini-ITX Intel Z270 motherboard in our charts and in comparison with models based on the Intel's Z170 chipset it's definitely quick. We chose to use an Intel Core i7-6700K processor to be able to compare the performance with other models we've reviewed previously. This motherboard is quick and comes with a good feature set and just the price of 196 Euro is a little bit too high. | |||
| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS ROG Strix Z270I Gaming excellent 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
ASUS Maximus IX Formula Review |
MSI Z270 XPower Gaming Titanium Edition Review
 |
|
|