Gigabyte Z170X-UD5 Motherboard Review: All Bases Covered

Final Thoughts about the Gigabyte Z170X-UD5 Motherboard

Looking dignified clad in matte black with tempered golden accents, the Gigabyte Z170X-UD5 is hardly what you would expect a mainstream motherboard to look like. It offers and performs much more than any middle-of-the-road offering as well, packed with plenty of provisions for even the most undecided of system builder should storage expansion be in the horizon. Keep in mind the inherent limitations of the Skylake mainstream desktop platform however as the limited PCI-E 3.0 lanes means that the numerous storage features will be a matter of “either-or” due to switching. The pair of 32GB m.2 storage for example will disable SATA ports when used at the same time so plan accordingly.

Gigabyte also provides a Thunderbolt version called the Z170X-UD5 TH which is almost identical to the Z170X-UD5 with the exception of one less LAN port, an extra USB 3.1 Type-C port and lack of DisplayPort and DVI-D output. The Thunderbolt version is a lot costlier at $219.99 because implementing dual daisy-chainable Thunderbolt 3 does not come cheap. The regular Z170X-UD5 however is remarkably affordable, currently sitting at $159.99. At this price, the feature set is extremely impressive and is a solid bang-for-buck option for many users,