Good mATX board for Skylake?

[badb0y]

I am looking at the following boards:

ASUS Z170 ROG Maximus VIII Gene
Gigabyte Z170MX Gaming 5
ASRock Z170M Extreme4

ASUS is obviously the cream of the crop but I kind of don't want to spend an extra $50-100 if I don't have to. My main concern is getting a stable overclock followed by having fan control. I like to change my fan speed on the fly via software and AI Suite lets me do that perfectly. Do these other board offer similar software or is it just ASUS that does this?

Thanks.

 

[xLegenday]

Well its like you say, basically your paying extra 50-100USD for the brand and minimal additional features. For sure the fan adjustments are nice to have, but with that price you'r saving off the board you get a awesome quiet cooler that keeps your CPU running on low temperatures.

 

[lukart]

True that, you save some money and besides ASrock is know to make awesome overclocking boards.

 

[repoman0]

I have the Asrock board. This is the first time I've used them, coming from an Asus Z68 board and I'm really pleased with it. The BIOS fan control works great ... it lets you set temperature vs fan voltage points for the 3 fan headers, where temp is either CPU or some temp sensor on the board. I never install mb software so no idea if it offers real time control.

I was looking at the Gigabyte board too but they refuse to use Intel LAN and use that dumb Killer NIC chip .. no thanks.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I have the Asrock board. This is the first time I've used them, coming from an Asus Z68 board and I'm really pleased with it. The BIOS fan control works great ... it lets you set temperature vs fan voltage points for the 3 fan headers, where temp is either CPU or some temp sensor on the board. I never install mb software so no idea if it offers real time control.

I was looking at the Gigabyte board too but they refuse to use Intel LAN and use that dumb Killer NIC chip .. no thanks.

Since the Z68's offered "real-time" fan control, so will the newer boards. On at least some of the Z77 boards, you had not two -- but three different fan-curves that could be set.

Not familiar yet with the Z170 boards, I can only say that the ASUS boards had options in the BIOS for "Turbo," "Normal," "Quiet" or similar settings, as well as "User." It is the "User" setting which corresponds to changes to fan curves made in the bundled ASUS software -- what was called "Fan Xpert" for the Z68 models.

I never bothered to uninstall the ASUS monitoring and OC'ing software in Windows after I'd created my fan-curves, but I believe -- once you have tweaked "Fan Xpert" or whatever it is called now, you could uninstall the software, leave the BIOS set to "User," and your custom fan-curves would still be effective. Of course, I could be wrong about that, but I'd wager something for it.

 

[Pheran]

I just built a system with the ASRock Z170M Extreme4 and an i5 6600. I'm not overclocking so I can't comment on that functionality, but otherwise the board is working great for me so far.