For Intel's official Skylake launch, Asus had a wide range of Z170 motherboards, supplied equally to gamers and overclockers. The Z170-A reviewed here is the most mainstream board we've seen, but it's still full-featured and has an attractive white and gray color scheme that should complement almost any PC build.

Asus Z170-A Release Date: The first availability for purchase in August 2015, it may not be consistent with the actual market launch date.

It may not have a flashing LED, bright colors, or even a postcode display to solve the problem. But the Asus Z170-A has everything you need to get a Skylake computer with four slots of DDR4 RAM running at up to 3400MHz support. Dedicated water-pump fan headers join the two CPU fan headers, increasing the total number of chassis fan headers to seven. If your case isn't very distinctive, you won't need to purchase an extra fan controller or connect an extension cable to your power supply. The I/O Shield will also not hinder the larger tower cooler, leaving plenty of area for our BeQuiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 Twin Fan Cooler surrounding the LGA 1151 socket.

The Z170-A is also designed with modern storage devices, a PCI-Express ready M.2 slot, and a SATA Express 2.5in SSD. You can use the interface as two SATA3 ports if you don't have a SATA Express device, bringing the total number of ports to six. It's enough for a PC with multiple hard disks, SSDs, and optical drives. If two graphics cards are installed, only the top PCI-Express x16 slot functions at full speed; the second and third slots are restricted to x8 speed. The three PCI-E x1 slots are a welcome addition to add wireless or other expansion cards, and they are also one of the only Z170 motherboards we've seen with a legacy PCI slot, meaning you can continue using any older card. 

Compared to the other Z170 boards I've seen, the Z170-A is a bit stingy when it comes to USB ports. There are only two regular USB ports, two USB3 ports, and two USB 3.1 ports on the back of the board. A reverse type-C connection is used in the next pair. If you have the right port, you can do more with it, as there are two USB3 headers at the bottom and right. If you want to use your processor's integrated graphics, the rear I/O panel has a complete complement of DVI, VGA, HDMI, and Displayport video outputs, although only three displays are supported at the same time. You'll also find a legacy PS / 2 keyboard port, Gigabit Ethernet, five 3.5mm audio jacks for analog 7.1, and digital optical output.

When using an Intel Core i5-6600K processor at the standard 3.9GHz Turbo speed, 8GB of Corsair DDR4 RAM, and an AMD Radeon R7 260x graphics card, the Z170-A scored 114 on our 4K multimedia benchmark. This makes it somewhat interoperable with other Skylake motherboards we've tested so far, as well as approximately 10% quicker than last year's Devil's Canyon Haswell update CPU. While we don't anticipate many Skylake users to stick with integrated graphics. Using the i5-6600HD K's Graphics 530 iGPU, the Z170-A can still get a steady 41.2fps frame rate at Showdown.

The Core i5-6600K was built with overclocking in mind, and the Z170-A ensures that you get the most out of it. BIOS settings overflow, but they're mostly hidden in advanced menus. The Asus EZ overclocking utility, which is available on the main screen, cautions errors, and only increased our CPU by 20% because we were using a tower cooler instead of a water-cooling system. It doesn't actually test what hardware you have, so if you are confident about your heatsink's cooling ability, you can opt for water cooling for the biggest performance boost. 

Instead, we manually upped the multiplier to 47 and slightly increased the CPU voltage to attain a steady 4.7GHz (above 3.9GHz), which improved the multimedia benchmark result to 130 overall. It wasn't as much as we've managed on other motherboards using the same component, but lots of BCLK (base clock). If you are willing to go beyond the CPU multiplier to change voltage settings and other variables, there is still plenty of opportunities to get the most out of your components.

It’s clear that Asus knows how power users want to get everything on the motherboard without going overboard with glamorous extras or unnecessary features that would discourage anyone working on a budget. The Z170-A is the cheapest Skylake motherboard we've ever seen, at about 30 pounds, but it has almost all of its connectivity alongside its more expensive rivals and overclocks. Unless you're ready to manually adjust settings without relying on Play-It-Safe automatic presets. If you need all-out performance or a lot of frills, the MSI Z170A Gaming M5 is certainly a better option for roughly $50 more, but the Skylake board is for everyone else.

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