Asus Z170-A ATX DDR4 Motherboards review

Asus Z170-A ATX DDR4 Motherboards review

Asus Z170-A ATX DDR4 Motherboards review

ProsImpressive performance for its price
Good selection of essential features
Easy to install and use

ConsOverly bulky plastic shroud
Lacks features of boards only a little pricier
Not enough USB ports on rear IO.

the asus z 170 a comes in asus is typical retail packaging for motherboards they really haven't changed much around compared to z97 looks pretty much the same as you can guess they've kept the same naming as well so we did review the z97 a and now we have a Z 178 again these are entry-level motherboards for the respective chipsets so on the front it just lets us know that it is izzy 170 a and it highlights the five-way optimization and USB 3.1 has a picture of the

board right here also lets us know you get a premium looks like you get a premium ship and a 15-day premium account to a world of warships which is kind of nice so you get a little value add on with the board on the back it's just going to go into detail on all of the information all the features and give you a full overview of the board so again if you are at the store you can get some information on the board before you go ahead and buy it let's open this up and see what

we have so as you can see we have the board first nicely protected and in anti-static bag right there so we'll get that out and of course we'll take a look at that second and we'll take a look at the accessories that will give this out of here carefully leave that out of the way and we'll take a look at our accessories so we have an i/o shield and again this is entry level so nothing special in this is shield it's not even painted just the typical silver I oh I would have liked to see at least

this be black or something like that this is really kind of bare bones I'm not a huge fan of that we have our drivers and utility CD as I always say if you're buying these motherboards go to the manufacturers website and get the latest drivers because these are probably outdated so move that out of the way we have a sli bridge right here we have our Q connectors and looks

like we only have AQ connector here for our front panel connections there's not one for USB or anything like that so what the Q connector does is it allows you to connect all of your front panel connections to this and then simply connect this to the headers on the board it just makes it so much easier it's one of my favorite features of asus motherboards that's been around for years now and it's just one of my favorite things just makes it easier especially if you're a first

time builder we have two bags of SATA cables a total of three so you have one SATA cable here in a bag and then only two more here so only three we typically see four again this isn't this is turning out to be very bare-bones as far as accessories go we have the CPU installation tool so this is something new that asus has done with their Z 170 motherboards we actually talked about it on the site last week or the week before that it's going to make it so much easier to

install a sky like CPU in the LGA 1151 socket I'm not going to open it up but I will go over the installation in our full review of this motherboard um it's a new thing just helps us so you don't bend your pins or mess up anything like that especially if you're a first time builder so they have included that we have a little screw for the m2 if you're going to install an m2 device here are the screws to lock it in and we have our users guide and that is it for accessories so taking a first look at the board we can see that asus has gone with the white and black color design this

is a follow-through from their x99 motherboards we saw it on a lot of those boards so they're following it through here so you pretty much have an all-black PCB and then we have the coverage here of your IO ports and white as well as white on the PCH heatsink starting at the center of the board we have Intel's LGA 1151 socket and that is made for Intel's brand new skylake processors right around there we have our power delivery components and asus makes

use of their digi+ vrm all digital power design you can see that asus is actually gone with these silver metallic heat sinks instead of the normal black ones that we saw on the prototypes of this board so we do have that little different color contrast in there up here we have an 8-pin EPS connector way up top the white connector is your CPA 4-pin cpu fan connector and you also

have a secondary cpu optional fan connector here in the black moving over to the side of the board we have for ddr4 dimm slots and this supports dual channel ddr4 memory up to thirty four hundred megahertz way up top here in the corner we have another four pin a fan connector you have your 24-pin ATX power connector and then we have a USB 3.0 header moving down we have our storage connections so you have your say to express port right here

and for sated six gig ports and one is actually labeled as your host drive that's going to actually help a lot of first-time users are not really sure where to plug things in so they have that labeled here and remember if you're not going to make use of the SATA Express port that actually opens up to more SATA ports the board also has an m2 slot right here and this is PCI Express 3.4 slots you're going to get a lot of speed out of that and it actually supports all the way up to

the 22 110 specification so you can fit some very very long m.2 ssds in there along the bottom of the board is where you're going to find the rest of your switches buttons and headers so starting right here you have your TPU switch you have your front panel connections and that's what you're going to use with that included Q connector you have your easy XMP switch 4 pin fan header external fan header USB 3.0 header to USB 2.0 headers your Thunderbolt header TPM

header power switch comport and your HD audio connections this board makes use of a Seuss's crystal sound three audio solution and that's going to give you clean and clear sound for all of your gaming needs as well as pretty much everything else it has full PCB isolation which you can kind of see right here asus has done that on their last few generations of motherboards you also have emi protection audio shielding and the PCB layers there's actually a separate PCB

layer for the left and right channel as far as expansion slots go you have one two three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots you have one two three PCI Express x1 slots and you have a legacy pci slot right here now the way the x16 slots will work is this lot will always run at x16 speeds if you have two cars installed they will run at x eight speeds and then this bottom one will always run at X for speed above the top PCI Express x1 slot you have two more for pin fan headers so that

gives you a total of four four pin fan headers not including your cpu and cpu optional fan header remember all of these headers can be controlled within the BIOS and they support PWM mode as well as DC mode so you can select your fans however you want there's also a white labeled header right here and this is actually not for fan this is to connect the pump from for your all-in-one water cooling unit now what's the point of this why would a COS put that on there well for one a lot of all-in-one water cooling units don't give you the ability within their

software to actually speed up the pump if you want to and if you speed up the pump you're going to get better performance some do some don't so what asus did was they put a dedicated header right there for your pump so normally we connect it to the CPU fan header but this you connect it to the new pump header and you can actually control the speed of the pump within the BIOS it's really cool and it's something that asus has added on there's e170 motherboards

moving on to expansion slots we have two USB 2.0 ports displayport hdmi vga DVI a combination ps2 port two USB 3.0 ports a intel-powered gigabit ethernet port a USB 3.1 port and this is the type a and typically you'll see this green color labeled for the USB 3.1 type a and then we have a USB 3.1 type c and then finally you have your audio connections so this wraps

up our quick unboxing and overview of the asus z1 70 a motherboard now make sure you check back very soon on think computer so that orcas will have our full written review which goes into detail on all the great features as well as benchmarks and all that fun stuff so until next time .

the Asus z170a we're going to take a look it's really bad you should not shake the box but I like shaking the box because I'm a crazy person the a-series boards are always a really interesting board to look at I always look forward to looking at those from Asus because they're always really interesting the x99 the a series is z87 a z97 series the tradition sort of continues with a

z170a I'm sort of a no-nonsense person it's like I like things that have bling but things that have bling is not the buying point for me it is features it is what does it do and the z170a it always it always sort of struck me that asus has put a lot of work into figuring out exactly what the cool stuff is and really sort of pouring it all into z170a or the a-series motherboards in general but don't put quite as much cool stuff in the a as say the deluxe but the a is quite a bit less expensive than the deluxe for example so asus has a ton of different motherboard parts there's the hero

there's you know mainstream boards there's om boards that are even less expensive that are designed for system builders and things like that and so there's you know virtually no bling on those motherboards and the features are kind of limited in comparison but the a series generally historically has given you a pretty good balance of overclock ability and onboard features and other features that are not necessarily related to overclocking in this case we're

going to talk a lot about the fan controller on this one because a su says one up themselves with their onboard fan controller stuff even on the a so we're gonna take a look at that but we got to go into the UEFI to do that let's take a quick look at the chipset now this is I skylight motherboard meaning that it is socket 1151 it's going to work with the i-5 6500 or the i7 6600 K processors probably other processors because there's going to be more than those two but

they're not out yet and so I don't know what those models are but sauk 1151 skylake those are the kinds of things you should look for in the processor this is for the sixth generation you know Core i5 core i7 i3 Pentium Celeron processors that are available in socket 1151 this is the z170 Express chipset it's got four dims support for up to 64 gigabytes of ddr4 the motherboard is certified for ddr4 3400 that's an overclocked 3333 and 1:33 regular speed non-ecc unbuffered

memory it has two PCI Express 3 by 16 slots that's that can operate it by 16 or by 8 by 8 it has one PCI Express 3 slot at maximum of by 4 that's actually for your nvme PCI Express SSD you've got 3 PCI Express 3.0 by 1 slot in one PCI slot so if you've got a legacy PCI device the z170a has one PCI slot for you now this guy like CPU has a built-in GPU the Intel HD you know 530 whatever happens to be built in here GPU and in terms of monitor out options this

motherboard actually gives you four options you get your legacy VGA port which I thought was an interesting choice in this day and age that hey VGA is still a thing no not really but hey that's ok you've also got display port HDMI and DVI D now the DisplayPort connection will actually support 4k at 60 Hertz it's the multi stream thing so it's an Intel thing so you take that with a little bit of a grain of salt it's not exactly the same as the DisplayPort support that you

would find in a full graphics card but you can do 4k at 60 Hertz and you can also do daisy chaining with the display port but the daisy chaining is not a new feature for the z170 chipset and skylake cpus now we've got one SATA Express port 6 SATA 6 ports 2 ports from the SATA Express connection we get the 1 m2 socket 3 with the M key so that supports both the PCI and the SATA mode so you can run this a PCI Express 3 by 4 or SATA it has one Intel a 2:19 v

Gigabit LAN it has a real tech RTL 892 a channel high definition audio codec featuring crystal sound 3 DTS studio sound and DTS connect it has one type of a USB 3.1 at the back panel and it has one USB type-c at the back panel 6 USB 3 ports and 6 USB 2 ports now this motherboard has a feature that has shown up in the channel motherboards called 5 way optimization well-thought way optimization does is it's there's basically a controller and an external clock

generator Asus has an external clock generator that's good for up to 400 megahertz with sky like the clocks for the PCI Express and the DMI and memory are all decoupled on Devil's Canyon and has well they were all coupled together so if you wanted to overclock you are going to end up overclocking your bus there was a little bit of an ability to play with the multiplier but it was not as flexible as sky like what sky like all of that is decoupled and so Asus is actually put on an external clock generator so you're going to be doing extreme overclocking it's there

but the difference between 200 and 400 megahertz you probably not going to see that but with the 5 way optimization you can actually enter the UEFI and basically have the system overclock itself you can also use AI suite and have the system overclock itself and so on the z170 deluxe which is you know their flagship motherboard we ran this we ran this with this i7 we were able to get 4.8 on two cores 4.7 on the other two cores repeated that test on the z170a and we got

identical results now the fastest ddr4 memory that I have is ddr4 3400 and a ddr4 3400 with that's with an overclock and that's it was an overclock of the XMP profile the the memory kit was actually ddr4 3200 I was able to get it to run to 3400 by playing with the timings loosening them a little bit that kind of thing the motherboard was actually stable with the D with four

sticks of ddr4 3400 so that's pretty good the deluxe actually advertises a higher overclock then at the z170a for the memory 3466 is the maximum overclock that the z170 deluxe reports where as DVR for 3400 is what does C 170 a reports I can't push past 3400 with any memory kit that I have so I can't say that oh yeah the z170a will actually work at a higher speed they just don't advertise that now I can tell you that the power delivery circuitry is a little bit simplified

compared to the z170 deluxe but again for point eight which realistically is probably the ceiling that you're going to get at even with a good liquid cooler on the the current skylake series CPUs I can hit 4.8 and it was stable on z170a so if you can do more than 4.8 on a skylake you've got a unicorn of a chip so good job and it's stable yeah that's really good so this motherboard does support nvme PCI Express SSD right if you get to the Intel 750 s you can use those in raid 1 or a 0 although keep in mind that the total amount of DMA 3.0 bandwidth that you have is 4

gigabytes per second if you want to learn more about the PCI Express arrangement and like how works and which slots go where because the two slots go to the CPU and then the DMI is you know PCI Express by four interface for all of the rest of your peripherals you should go watch our skylake video that's just info about the platform to learn you know how all that is arranged and how oh let's put together but for now suffice it to say you can do nvme raid and

then less you have the Intel SSDs or the are the Samsung 950 or the 950 one you are not going to bottleneck if you've got you know two or three of the Plex sir I'm about two SSDs which we like and which are way more affordable than the Intel 750 s you can raid those and you're not going to bottleneck you're going to hit you know 2 gigabytes per second with two or three of those in raids so that's pretty good now asus has done something a little different with the land

they've actually bundled a network optimization software this is really packet prioritization quality of service software that is aware of games and is sort of aware of different things that would need different priorities as far as packet prioritization goes and that's built on top of the Intel I to 19 Gigabit LAN interface and so we're seeing packet prioritization on the Intel side of things now typically some manufacturers may use you know a real tech or a different other

controller for a second network interface this motherboard only has one network interface it's an Intel network interface so that's good and then they also bundle the packet prioritization software so you really get the best of both worlds with that setup now this is sort of the same color scheme and sort of saying the same color design as we've seen in other asus channel motherboards but the power delivery system here is a little simplified versus what we saw on

the deluxe and with the deluxe we had to combine heat pipe and the fancier heatsink assembly here we just have you know two separate heat sinks and they're going to expect airflow from the case or from the CPU cooler there is plenty of room around the CPU socket the capacitors maybe you're crowding the CPU socket a little bit but they're low profile capacitors and so I don't think you're going to have any problems with any of the tower coolers we tested a bunch

of different tower coolers from Noctua and a whole bunch of others and we didn't have any problems with any of the tower coolers that we tested and of course all in one water coolers are also fine at the bottom edge of the board we've got the s/pdif output the front panel connector the serial connector an on-board mechanical power switch at TPM interface we've got our Thunderbolt header for a sixth under expansion option so so if you're going to run a PCI

Express Thunderbolt adapter then you'll want to plug in the Thunderbolt expansion card here then we've got our two USB 2.0 front panel connectors this gives you a total of four USB 2.0 ports we've got our second USB three front panel interface connector we've also got support here for our external fan controller now if you remember from the z170 deluxe we actually have the other fan controller board the breakout board that gives you the option of being able to

control a huge set of fans this is sort of a this is sort of become a standard peripheral from Asus to where it's like ah you want you know you want more fan control you want more fan control directly from the UEFI we've got a breakout board that gives you DC and PWM control of all of the fans and this sort of breaks it out we've got another fan header and we're going to talk a little bit more about the fan header in a minute the easy XMP switch front panel connector and the TPU switches now let's talk for just a second about these switches most memory kits that

you would use with skylake have two built-in profiles they have a profile where the memory runs a 2133 that's the default speed of ddr4 and then they have another profile called the extreme memory profile or XMP usually you have to go into the UEFI and you have to tell you efi hey don't use the default speed of 2133 use the speed that the memory is rated at generally that speed requires increasing the voltage that's delivered to the memory but it's supported by

the manufacturer so in our case we're using g.skill ddr4 Ripjaws this is dr for 3000 and so it does have an extreme memory profile or XMP configuration that will want to load the TP use which kind of works the same way but it's around the power delivery system for the cpu and so if you're using a really crappy CPU cooler you'll probably leave it on the default switch if you're going to use an air cooler or really lightweight all-in-one cooler you might use the middle

setting and if you get a good all-in-one water cooler you would probably use the far setting and that tells the motherboard sort of what sort of cooling solution to expect on the CPU and so when you're doing things like running the you know running the auto overclock or running the sideway optimization and doing the other things like that that it sort of tells the motherboard what to expect as far as cooling and how recive it can be as far as overclocks and power

delivery and so of course the most extreme option will generate the most heat needs the best cooling options needs the most fans in the case and that sort of thing and so you'll want to be sure that you set that you know to the switch of course you don't have to use the switch you can still just go through the UEFI but if you want the easy button solution you can do that and you

know do the auto button you're good to go now in this case the c-17 ta does not come with the fan expansion board but you can buy it later as an accessory and control even more fans so in terms of the fan control support this motherboard actually has seven fan headers with one header dedicated for water pump control we're talking about you know seven fan headers full DC and PWM control the UEFI they've really outdone themselves this time in terms of the fan

control situation so one of the things that some people complained about in the last couple of generations was that when you change from one preset to another that it doesn't ramp slowly you can now actually pick that in the UEFI there's an option for picking how you ramp the speed of the fan from one home from one level to another if you do that over thirty seconds or you do that over five seconds or you do it immediately however you want to do that you have

the option in the UEFI to pick how you ramp the fan speed that's not just on the z170a that's also on the z170 deluxe and the other boards in the channel series probably also other boards even other than that but I haven't gotten to those yet so we'll see so in the UEFI you can also pick for every fan header if it's DC or PWM mode now this UEFI also adds another feature which is auto fan calibration you can go into the UEFI and you can basically let it automatically calibrate your fans go into UEFI set the option and it will ramp all of the fan headers up and

down it will find the minimum DC or PWM levels to actually spin the fan it'll find the minimum RPMs of the fan and the maximum RPMs of the fan so that the calibration curves and the controls that you set for the fans can be exactly what you want so if you want a system that's whisper quiet or you want a system that you really have fine-grained control of the fans this motherboards got that feature so what have you got in the box well in the box you've got

the user installation manual you've got the CD you get the backplate cover you've got three SATA cables you get your cue connectors and you get your SLI bridge and then you've got a little bit of mounting hardware for an m2 SSD pretty much it no frills nothing gets in the way no extra stuff more than three SATA cables might be nice but honestly who would even use three in this day and age you know isn't everything MDOT too and that's pretty much it for the

box that this does support you too but you have to get the adapter to do that so that you go from the m2 slot to the little mini sax connector and then cable out from there or you know the SATA Express to whatever interface if you want to do it that way you know what how're you going to do the connection all in all it's been a pretty solid board and I'm happy that I was able to hit four point eight on the overclocks on that I'm happy that I was able to on the memory at

the maximum end for maximum overclock the g.skill memory was of course pretty great and for the cooler I was also sort of messing around with this captain 240 deep cool cooler which did a pretty good job keeping it cool even at four point eight had a little trouble keeping up with some of the insane you know like a 264 burn in testing but for real-world performance and doing gaming at four point eight I was able to keep up and it's a

relatively compact unit there's really only two options right now for USB 3.1 the Intel Alpine Ridge and as media this particular motherboard provides it's USB 3.1 connectivity through and as media controller so just keep that in mind so overall the verdict on this and some motherboard delivers a really solid set of features at a really aggressive price point I would like to see more USB connectivity included in the Box maybe they could throw in a USB 2 header

breakout header or something like that but honestly you can pick up one of those for a couple of bucks so it's not really a big deal overall in terms of features and value the a-series always impresses me with the value that they bring in this motherboard is no exception I really like it if you're going to build a system with one of these or you have built a system with one of these let us know what your thoughts and pression czar and we'll see you in the forums I'm Windell I'm signing up I'll see you later .

Asus Z170-A ATX DDR4 Motherboards review

the z170 motherboard this is the Asus z170a and it's pretty much their entry-level motherboard for the z170 chipset so let's go ahead and take a look the Asus z170a comes in Asus is typical retail packaging for motherboards they really haven't changed much around compared to z97 looks pretty much the same as you can guess they've kept the same naming as well so we did review the z97 a and now we have the z1 78 again these are entry-level motherboards for the

respective chipsets so on the front it just lets us know that it is a z170a and it highlights the 5 way optimization and USB 3.1 has a picture of the board right here also lets us know you get a premium looks like you get a premium ship and a 15-day premium account to a world of warships which is kind of nice so you get a little value add-on with the board on the back it's

just going to go into detail on all of the information all the features and give you a full overview of the board so again if you are at the store you can get some information on the board before you go ahead and buy it let's open this up and see what we have so as you can see we have the board first nicely protected and in anti-static bag right there so we'll get that out and of course

we'll take a look at that second and we'll take a look at the accessories so I get this out of here carefully leave that out of the way and we'll take a look at our accessories so we have an i/o shield and again this is entry level so nothing special on this i/o field it's not even painted just the typical silver ion shield I would have liked to see at least this be black or something like that this is really kind of bare-bones I'm not a huge fan of that we have our drivers in utility CD as I

always say if you're buying these motherboards go to the manufacturers website and get the latest drivers because these are probably outdated so move that out of the way we have a sli bridge right here we have our Q connectors it looks like we only have a Q connector here for our front panel connections there's not one for USB or anything like that so what the Q connector does is it allows you to connect all of your front panel connections to this and then simply connect this to the headers on the board it just makes it so much easier it's one of my

favorite features of ASUS motherboards that's been around for years now and it's just one of my favourite things just makes it easier especially if you're a first-time builder we have two bags of SATA cables a total of three so you have one SATA cable here in a bag and then only two more here so only three we typically see four again this isn't this is turning out to be very bare-bones as far as accessories go we have the CPU installation tool so this is something new

that asus has done with their z170 motherboards we actually talked about it on the site last week or the week before that it's going to make it so much easier to install a skylight CPU in the LGA 1151 socket I'm not gonna open it up but I will go over the installation in our full review of this motherboard it's a new thing just help it so you don't bend your pins or mess up anything like that especially if you're a first-time builder so they have included that we have a

little screw for the m2 if you're going to install an m2 device here are the screws to lock it in and we have our user's guide and that is it for accessories so taking a first look at the board we can see that asus has gone with the white and black color design this is a follow through from their x99 motherboards we saw it on a lot of those boards so they're following it through here so you pretty much have an all-black PCB and then we have the coverage here of your airports in

white as well as white on the PCH heatsink starting at the center of the board we have Intel's LGA 1151 socket and that is made for Intel's brand new skylake processors right around there we have our power delivery components and ACS makes use of their digi+ vrm all digital power design you can see that HS is actually gone with these silver metallic heat sinks instead of the normal black ones that we saw on the prototypes of this board so we do have that little

different color contrast in there up here we have an 8 pin EPS connector way up top the white connector is your CA 4 pin CPU fan connector and you also have a secondary CPU optional fan connector here in the black moving over to the side of the board we have four ddr4 dimm slots and this supports dual channel ddr3 up to 30 400 megahertz way up top here in the corner we have another 4 pin a fan connector you have your 24 pin ATX power connector and then we

have a USB 3.0 header moving down we have our storage connections so you have your SATA Express port right here and 4 SATA 6 gigabits and one is actually labeled as your OS drive that's going to actually help a lot of first-time users are not really sure where to plug things in so they have that labeled here and remember if you're not going to make use of the SATA Express port that actually opens up to more SATA ports the board also has an m2 slot right

here and this is PCI Express 3.0 X 4 slots you're going to get a lot of speed out of that and it actually supports all the way up to the 20 to 110 specification so you can fit some very very long m2 SSDs in there along the bottom of the board is where you're going to find the rest of your switches buttons and headers so starting right here you have your TPU switch you have your front panel connections and that's what you're going to use with that included q connector you have your easy XMP switch 4 pin fan header external fan header USB 3.0 header 2 USB 2.0

headers your thunderbolt header TPM header power switch comport and your HD audio connections this board makes use of Asus crystal sound 3 audio solution and that's going to give you clean and clear sound for all of your gaming needs as well as pretty much everything else it has full PCB isolation which you can kind of see right here H has done that on their last few generations of motherboards you also have EMI protection audio shielding and the PCB layers

there's actually a separate PCB layer for the left and right channel as far as expansion slots go you have one two three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots you have one two three PCI Express x1 slots and you have a legacy PCI slot right here now the way the x16 slots will work is this slot will always run at x16 speeds if you have two cards installed they will run at x8 speeds and then this bottom one will always run at x4 speed above the top PCI Express x1 slot you have two more

for pin fan headers so that gives you a total of four four pin fan headers not including your CPU and CPU optional fan header remember all of these headers can be controlled within the BIOS and they support PWM mode as well as DC mode so you can select your fans however you want there's also a white labeled header right here and this is actually not for a fan this is to connect the pump from for your all-in-one water cooling unit now what's the point of this

why what ACS put that on there well for one a lot of all-in-one water cooling units don't give you the ability within their software to actually speed up the pump if you want to and if you speed up the pump you're going to get better performance some do some don't so what Asus did was they put a dedicated header right there for your pump so normally we connect it to the CPU fan header but this you connect it to the new pump header and you can actually control

the speed of the pump within the BIOS it's really cool and it's something that Asus has added on their z170 motherboards moving on to expansion slots we have 2 USB 2 Newport's DisplayPort HDMI VGA DVI a combination ps2 port two USB 3.0 ports a Intel powered Gigabit Ethernet port a USB 3.1 port and this is the type-a and typically you'll see this green color labeled for the USB 3.1 type-a and then we have a USB 3.1 type C and then finally you

have your audio connections so this wraps up our quick unboxing and overview of the Asus z170a motherboard now make sure you check back very soon on think computer so that orgas will have our full written review which goes into detail on all the great features as well as benchmarks and all that fun stuff so until next time catch you guys later

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ASUS Z170-P

ModelBrandASUSModelZ170-P
Supported CPUCPU Socket TypeLGA 1151CPU TypeCore i7 / i5 / i3 / Pentium / Celeron (LGA1151)Supported CPU TechnologiesTurbo Boost Technology 2.0
ChipsetsChipsetIntel Z170
Onboard VideoOnboard Video ChipsetIntegrated Graphics Processor - Intel HD Graphics support
Multi-VGA output support: HDMI/DVI-D port
- Supports HDMI with max. resolution 4096 x 2160@24Hz / 2560 x 1600@60Hz
- Supports DVI-D with max. resolution of 1920 x 1200 @60Hz
Supports Intel InTru 3D/Quick Sync Video/Clear Video HD Technology/Insider
Maximum shared memory of 512MB

Multi-GPU Support: Supports AMD CrossFireX Technology
MemoryNumber of Memory Slots4×288pinMemory StandardDDR4 3466*(*O.C.)/ 3400*/ 3333*/ 3300*/ 3200*/ 3000*/ 2800*/ 2666*/ 2400*/ 2133Maximum Memory Supported64GBChannel SupportedDual Channel
Expansion SlotsPCI Express 3.0 x161 x PCI Express 3.0/2.0 x16 slot (at x16 mode)
1 x PCI Express 3.0/2.0 x16 slot (max. at x4 mode, compatible with PCIe x1 and x4 devices)PCI Express x12 x PCI Express 3.0/2.0 x1 slotsPCI Slots2 x PCI Slots
Storage DevicesSATA 6Gb/s4 x SATA 6.0Gb/s ports (gray)M.21 x M.2 Socket 3 with M Key, type 2242/2260/2280 storage devices support (both SATA & PCIE mode)SATA RAID0/1/5/10
Onboard AudioAudio ChipsetRealtek ALC887Audio Channels8 Channels
Onboard LANLAN ChipsetRealtek 8111HMax LAN Speed10/100/1000Mbps
Rear Panel PortsPS/21 x PS/2 keyboard port
1 x PS/2 mouse portVideo Ports1 x DVI-D portHDMI1 x HDMIRJ451 x LAN (RJ45) portsUSB 3.02 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports (blue, Type A)
1 x USB 5Gb/s Type C portUSB 1.1/2.02 x USB 2.0/1.1 portsAudio Ports3-Jack 8-Channel Audio I/O ports
Internal I/O ConnectorsOnboard USB2 x USB 3.0/2.0 connectors support additional 4 USB ports (19-pin)
2 x USB 2.0/1/1 connectors support additional 4 USB portsOther Connectors1 x 4-pin CPU Fan connector for both 3-pin (DC mode) and 4-pin (PWM mode) CPU coolers control*
2 x 4-pin Chassis Fan connectors for 3-pin (DC mode) and 4-pin (PWM mode) coolers control
1 x Front panel audio connector
1 x System panel connector
1 x S/PDIF out header
1 x 24-pin EATX Power connector
1 x 8-pin EATX 12V Power connector
1 x COM header
1 x Clear CMOS jumper

* The CPU Q-Fan control setting is set as default in Auto mode for detecting the type of CPU fan installed and switches to the control mode automatically.
Physical SpecForm FactorATXDimensions (W x L)12.01" x 8.82"
FeaturesFeaturesASUS Special Features

ASUS 5X PROTECTION II
- ASUS LANGuard - Protects against LAN surges, lightning strikes and static-electricity discharges!
- ASUS Overvoltage Protection - World-class circuit-protecting power design
- ASUS DIGI+ VRM - 4+2+1 Phase digital power design
- ASUS DRAM Overcurrent Protection: Enhanced DRAM overcurrent protection
- ASUS Stainless-Steel Back I/O: 3X corrosion-resistance for greater durability!

Superb Performance
M.2 onboard - The latest transfer technologies with up to 32Gb/s data transfer speeds
ASUS Fan Xpert 3 - Featuring Fan Auto Tuning function and multiple thermistors selection for optimized system cooling control
ASUS EPU - EPU
PC Cleaner - Fast and easy way to get rid of unnecessary junk files
UEFI BIOS - Most advanced options with fast response time
USB 3.0 Boost - featuring speedy USB 3.0 transmission

Gaming Scenario
Audio Features - Audio that roars on the battlefield
Media Streamer
- Pipe music or movies from your PC to a smart TV, your entertainment goes wherever you go!
- Media Streamer app for portable smartphone/tablet, supporting iOS 7 & Android 4.0 systems

ASUS Exclusive Features
- ASUS Ai Charger
- ASUS AI Suite 3
- ASUS Disk Unlocker featuring 3TB + HDD support
- Anti Surge

EZ DIY
Push Notice - Monitor your PC status with smart devices in real time
UEFI BIOS EZ Mode
- featuring friendly graphics user interface
- ASUS O.C. Tuner
- ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3
- ASUS EZ Flash 3
Q-Design
- ASUS Q-DIMM
- ASUS Q-Slot

ASUS Quiet Thermal Solution

Quiet Thermal Design:
- ASUS Fan Xpert 3
- Stylish Fanless Design: PCH Heat-sink & MOS Heat-sink solution

ASUS Exclusive Overclocking Features

Precision Tweaker 2:
- vCore: Adjustable CPU Core voltage at 0.005V increment
- iGPU: Adjustable CPU Graphics voltage at 0.005V increment
- vCCIO: Adjustable Analog and Digital I/O voltage at 0.005V increment
- vCCSA: Adjustable CPU System Agent voltage at 0.005V increment
PackagingPackage ContentsAccessories
- 2 x Serial ATA 6.0Gb/s cables
- 1 x I/O Shield
- 1 x M.2 screw package
- 1 x Support DVD
- 1 x User's manual.