Gigabyte Z170X UD5 Motherboard Review

As overclockers we often demand more from our hardware and want something that is specially built to help us reach insane levels regardless of what hardware we are planning to run.  The drawback of these products is often cost and availability which can also limit people from experimenting.  Causal overclockers and hardware enthusiasts can often look to the mainstream for a suitable alternative and the GA-Z170X-UD5 does not disappoint.  The motherboard features some great benchtop options like voltage test points, onboard buttons for power and reset and a solid VRM for better stability.  There is no doubt that a properly cooled "K" edition processor can run great on this board and there are plenty of heatsinks to ensure it can maintain that level for quite some time.
 
Motherboard layout is quite good and follows, what appears to be, a standard design layout that was established back with the Z68 days.  The design will support up to three graphics cards but is clearly optimized for dual card operation and supports the new PCI Express 3.0 standard which is native to the Skylake processor.  The Z170 chipset comes with 20 PCI Express 3.0 lanes dedicated to storage and connectivity.  As a result you will also get two 4x M.2 sockets and three SATA Express ports each with dedicated bandwidth.  

Overclocking the GA-Z170X-UD5 was pretty straight forward due in part to the familiar Gigabyte UEFI.  The Power IR Digital PWM really helped stabilize the system at higher speeds and produced very little heat compared to what is usually expected.   It should be noted that memory overclocking on this motherboard is quite good and is bound to get better a module yields improve.  For this review I used Corsair 2666Mhz modules with an XMP profile that enabled them to run at 2800Mhz.  With some more tweaking I have no doubt that 3000Mhz is possible from these modules, or someone could just install a faster kit and enable XMP.

Dual Card SLI Support
Extra space between video card slots
SATA Express
Dual M.2 Slots
Triple Monitor Onboard Video
Power IR Digital PWM
Gold Plated CPU Socke

Nothing really comes to mind