There's a trend currently being bucked these days by several hardware manufacturers and that's launching motherboards that have an imperial design (insane even) along with some impressive specs and features. We see it from the likes of MSI and Asus. Now Gigabyte has followed right along that trend with its newly released Z170X Gaming 6 motherboard.
To gain full knowledge on what you need to know about Z170X Gaming 6 you have to separately examine its design, features and specs, mainly because the motherboard bolds well in all three of the mentioned categories.
First off we have.....
The Design
Like most highend motherboards you're seeing entering the market, the Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 6 is accented with an impressive color scheme that features a black,white and red theme. The PCB is completely covered in matte black. Look closely at the motherboard you'll see the PCIe slots is all red with hinge of white,impressive. Other main components on the motherboard such as the chipset is laced perfectly in the same red and white color scheme.
Overall, the design of the motherboard with its all black matte PCB, well balanced red,black and white color theme gives the motherboard some character.
Then there's the specs and features
The Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 6 specs and features goes as follows; it will support the latest 6th generation Intel Core Skylake processors, 4 DIMM slots is present supporting the latest dual channel DDR4 memory, handling speeds up to 3466MHz.
Like most motherboards manufactured today, the Z170X Gaming 6 has its standard USB 3.0 ports, 7 ports in total (3 ports on a the back panel, 4 ports made available through its internal headers). Impressively, the motherboard now supports USB 3.1 with USB Type-C, unimpressive is there's no support for Thunderbolt 3, what the F***?
Onto the graphics, the Z170X has three PCIe slots that support 3-way multi-GPU configuration. On a side note: if by chance you decide to setup 3 to 4 way SLI/CrossFire configuration, I would go with a X99 motherboard that's paired with appropriate processor. Two way SLI on the Z170X Gaming 6 have speeds that measure x8/x8. There is also 4x PCIe x1 gen 3.0 slots present for card expansion.
As a storage option, the Gigabyte Z170X has 3x SATA Express connectors up to 16Gb/s data transfer, 6 SATA 6Gb/s connector. Importantly, it has the M.2 ports which will support M.2 SATA SSD.
Probably the most impressive feature on the Z170X Gaming 6 motherboard is its embedded high quality audio capacitors that has LED trace path lighting, this could be an industry first. The audio chipset is Realtek ALC1150 SNR HD Audio.
The rest of the I/O ports are pretty much standard nothing in the way of anything overly impressive,it has HDMI port, a DisplaPort, PS/2 combo port,two RJ-45 LAN ports, both networking ports with different manufacturers the Killer E2200 and the other being Intel Gigabit.
There is no release date or price point from Gigabyte,but the features within the motherboard and its impressive design makes me wish it was available now. Like all tech you see being debut on the market now, I expect the Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 6 motherboard to be release in the coming weeks just in time for the holiday shopping season.