Now Boarding For Kaby Lake We Review Four Z270 Motherboards MD’s Ryzen processors and new chipsets might have taken some of the luster off of Intel’s Kaby Lake CPUs and the Z270 chipset, but there are still plenty of reasons to go Team Blue with your next build. High-speed storage enthusiasts, for example, can build a RAID array with multiple PCIe, NVMe SSDs— each running over a PCIe 3.0 x4 bus. By comparison, Ryzen and the X370 chipset only provide one PCIe 3.0 x4 bus. Motherboard makers also support much faster DDR4 modules with Intel’s Z270 chipset (typically up to 4,000MHz) than AMD’s X370 chipset, which often top out at 3,200MHz. Another good reason to consider the Z270 chipset is the platform’s relative maturity. Unlike the limited selection of Ryzen motherboards on the market—with most manufacturers only offering three or four boards— most all motherboard companies provide a complete lineup of Z270 motherboards. Many high-end Z270 motherboards with the latest amenities retail for around $300 and go up to $500, while more basic boards start around $125. In short, there’s a Z270 board for most any budget. If you’re trying to decide between Z270 and the older Z170 platform, you should consider a few factors, including internal and external device connectivity. Intel provides 24 PCIe 3.0 chipset lanes on Z270, up from 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes on Z170. The extra lanes give motherboard manufacturers quite a bit of flexibility for M.2, U.2, USB, and Thunderbolt
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3 connectivity. Almost all of the Z270 motherboards we’ve tested to date feature two or more USB 3.1 ports, and manufacturers usually include one reversible Type-C port. Many high-end motherboards, such as the models in this roundup, feature multiple M.2 and U.2 ports. Also, the Z270 chipset has a potential ace up its sleeve in the form of native support for Intel Optane, which is a new storage and memory technology based on 3D XPoint memory media. Intel recently launched its first Optane SSD, the DC P4800X, an enterprise add-in card SSD. When available for consumers, Intel Optane devices are expected function as both high-speed storage and custom virtual memory. Intel Optane performance is likely to be slower than conventional DRAM, but faster than traditional SSDs. In particular, Intel Optane should be good for random workloads a t l ow q u e u e d e p t h s , w h e re t h e majority of real-world activity occurs.
The Z270 chipset supports both Intel’s Kaby Lake desktop CPUs, such as the Core i7-7770K, and Skylake processors, such as the Core i7-6700K. With Kaby Lake, Intel provides the usual selection of Core i7/i5/i3 chips, headlined by the unlocked Core i77700K and Core i5-7600K. Our test bed features the Core i7-7700K. This quad-core processor boasts HyperThreading to handle eight concurrent threads—identical to the Core i76700K. The Core i7-7700K is faster than its Skylake counterpart with a 4.2GHz core clock, up 200MHz from the Core i7-6700K, and a 4.5GHz Turbo Boost 2.0 frequency. Our test system also features GIGABYTE’s GeForce GTX 1080 Xtreme Gaming, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance LED DDR4-3200MHz memory, and a 480GB Patriot Hellfire SSD. To prevent the CPU from throttling under load, we used Alphacool’s Eiswand 360 CPU, a huge external AIO liquid cooling tower. The whole system is powered by an EVGA SuperNOVA 850 T2, an 80 PLUS Titanium-certified PSU. As we mentioned, this roundup features premium Z270 motherboards with high-end models from AORUS, EVGA, MSI, and Supermicro. There’s a l i t t l e s o m e t h i n g f o r e ve r yo n e , whether you’re looking for a platform for overclocking, multi-GPU gaming, or luxurious looks.
Supermicro C7Z270-PG Since the introduction of Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor family and the Z77 chipset, mainstream Intel processors