Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & conclusion
ASRock has a terrific offering with the Z170 Gaming k6/K6+. The products looks just fantastic and offers everything you need really. Obviously whether or not you need to upgrade to Skylake remains an icky discussion. Skylake isn't the next best thing, that's going to be Skylake-E I guess. Impressive remains to be the power consumption of this Core i5 6600K / Z170 Gaming K6 combo that is just incredible. I mean while using the IGP for graphics we noticed 25 Watt idle power consumption and roughly 65 watt under load. That really is impressive and thanks due to the smaller 14nm fabrication process. The series Z170 chipset will drive SATA3, M.2, some manufacturers will even go U2 and Sata Express. Then there's the added benefit of DDR4 memory that not only uses less power, the frequency can be so much higher as well, bringing more bandwidth and overall performance to the applications that require fast memory. Combine that with things like nice Gigabit jacks, exemplary audio solutions on the new motherboards and things like USB 3.1. So what I am trying to say here is that the overall platform experience is what it is all about for Skylake. Good performance with kick-ass features. Multiple multi-GPU configurations are possible up-to 2-way, you'll get many USB 3.0/3.1 ports and of course an improved and enhanced audio solution based off the Realtek ALC 1150 codec. But lets not forget an the KillerNIC E2400.
Performance & tweaking
The overall performance as such I'd rate as "good" for this Core i5 6600K. Temps remain quite low and temperatures when the CPU is overclocked with added voltage definitely seem to be a notch better opposed to Haswell.Unfortunately we have a bit of a rough sample, we could not reach 4.7 GHz stable on liquid cooling. At that level we tried anything from 1.175 upto 1.45 volts in the processor. The motherboard we used was running a non-final BIOS though. Then again 4.6 GHz stable, isn't a bad result either I guess. The motherboard offers everything you need for a decent tweak, and if you want overclocked memory, just purchase a nice kit that is XMP 2.0 ready , enable it in the BIOs and boom there she takes off. Hats off to ASRock in terms of tweaking and overclocking. It is very easy on this motherboard thanks to a very mature and user friendly uEFI BIOS. It's relatively easy to navigate through with and without a mouse. So pop a nice liquid cooling kit on the processor and you will get to the 4600~4700 MHz range with a 6600K easily.
Power consumption
If we step back and take the Intel reference board with a Sandy Bridge processor (2600K) without a dedicated graphics card that platform idles at roughly 50 Watts. Once we stress the processor 100% on that platform you'll see ~120 Watts power consumption. With Haswell (4790) we noticed roughly 42 Watts in idle and 109 Watts with processor load at 100%. With Broadwell-H we can measure roughly 30 Watts in idle and once we stress the processor 100% on that platform we leveled out at give or take 100 Watts. Skylake with the Core i5 6600K really is impressive here, 25 Watts in idle and 65 Watts under CPU load. With a dedicated GPU installed these numbers run at 40 Watt idle and 80 Watt under CPU load. The 14nm series are more energy friendly.
The bottom line
ASRock slowly and steadily is playing in the big league of the motherboard arena. Todays review is a perfect example of a motherboard that offers high-end features and decent tweakability. Combine the six SATA 6 Gbps ports, the KillerNIC Ethernet interface and the 7.1 channel HD audio as delivered by the high-end Realtek ALC1150 codec and we already are happy. Z170 motherboards offer you everything and anything you need from an enthusiast class Skylake desktop processor platform, in terms of features, multi-GPU support, USB 3.0/3.1, SATA3, PCIe Gen 3.0, ease of tweaking and sure, the design and component selection is done well. We would have liked to seen one extra NIC and added AC WIFI though. Overall we feel this is a very nice motherboard that will appeal to the high-end PC gaming crowd that likes to overclock a bit as well. Combined this Z170 motherboard, a kickin' graphics card, some snazzy memory and an SSD this setup is Windows 10 and DirectX12 ready to frag away in your gaming experience. If you want to rule it all and have no budget restrictions, Haswell-E with 6 or 8-cores still rocks the best IMHO. We think the ASRock Z170 gaming K6 / K6+ is a terrific build and thus product. It has a nice feature-set, overclocks (if your CPU allows it) pretty well and is offering a nice audio solution. Worthy of our recommended award.
Update the suggested retail rpice for this product is € 265
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