The GIGABYTE Z170X-Gaming G1 Review: Quad-SLI on Skylake, and now with Thunderbolt 3
by Ian Cutress on December 1, 2015 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gaming
- Intel
- Gigabyte
- PLX
- PLX8747
- Z170
- Thunderbolt 3
CPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC (DDR4-2133 C15) for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link
Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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wperry - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Stopped reading at the first sentence. I'm sure it's snazzy and all, but no.ImSpartacus - Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - link
Yeah, I'm struggling to believe that Anandtech just formally recommended a $500 consumer motherboard.I know that the classic response will be, "well it's just a recommendation for those that want to spend that much money." But the problem is that the recommendation didn't say that in fine print. Those kinds of reasonable caveats don't make it on the "Anandtech recommended!" stickers that get put on the motherboard boxes.
It just seems weird.
samsonjs - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
Who needs to be told that it might be out of their price range? I think that's something people can figure out themselves.JVC8bal - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link
No one needs a Ferrari or Bugatti. They're way overpriced for a car. But they are exemplar fetes of engineering. Believe it or not, there's people whom it doesn't matter whether they pay $20k or $2M for a car - it's a drop in the pan for them.Chad - Sunday, January 3, 2016 - link
Meh... just get the Gigabyte GA-Z170X-UD5 TH instead... almost all of the features at less than half the price.Zak - Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - link
Hey, but it's got three Krap NICs!Mikemk - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Looks awesome. The black DIMMs sortof strand out though, they should be wire.nathanddrews - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
Which page tests the quad-SLI feature? I can't find it.DigitalFreak - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
That's part of the problem with Anandtech (and review sites in general). The guy that does the MB reviews usually isn't the guy who does the GPU reviews, so he won't have access to the equipment to do those kind of tests.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link
And to be fair I don't even have 4 matching cards for quad-SLI. It's a very rare setup.