The Board - Layout

Freed from the anti-static bag, the ASUS Z170-DELUXE and ASUS' new esthetic are obvious, even striking. The white and silver of the shroud and heatsinks blend really well, standing out from the board's black surface. The rear of the board is fairly busy with stuff here and there, including a surface-mounted chip or two.


The socket area, surrounded by the large VRM cooler, remains fairly open due to how the heatsink slopes away, while the back of the socket has metal plates that spread the heat the CPU's hot power components produce. Looking at the socket itself, we can see that some added pins beyond the default 1151 make contact with the additional pads. The box or ASUS' marketing material I looked at make no mention of these, and in my testing, the pins made no difference, which is different from ASUS' X99 Express boards since those definitely came with clocking abilities that boards without such a socket did not have.


There are four standard DDR4 slots on the ASUS Z170-DELUXE, ready to support DIMMS of up to 3733 MHz and densities of up to 64 GB (16 GB per stick). The expansion slots are all PCIe-based, with four PCIe 3.0 x1 slots and three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots. The lowest PCIe slot can connect devices with a x4 or x2 link, and the top two PCIe x16 slots take their x16 link from the CPU, either dedicated to the upper-most slot or split evenly between them in a x8/x8 configuration.


The rear I/O panel has a wide variety of USB ports, an HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort, dual LAN ports, and the audio connectivity you would expect, with both analogue and digital present. SATA ports allow for up to 8 SATA 6 Gb/s devices (with two additional ports making up an SATA Express port), while a single M.2 port sits just above the lowest slot, ready for both SATA and PCIe modes.


The board's bottom edge comes with the usual suspects; USB headers and buttons and such are all here, including Power, RESET, USB BIOS Flashback, and, of course, a POST display (which displays POST codes and nothing else).