The Board - A Closer Look

Along with the new platform and the somewhat new look, ASUS also introduced a fair bit of new features all their own, dependent on the BIOS that supports it all, which has this time been written to a 128 Mb Flash ROM.


Once you power the board up, there are a series of LEDs in various places on the ASUS Z170-DELUXE to indicate which part of the system is being tested during the POST process as the system boots. CPU and DRAM each get their own LED.


Just above the PCIe slots sits the VGA LED, and just under the PCH cooler is the Boot Device LED. So should anything go amiss while booting, these LEDs will let you know what area to focus your troubleshooting on.


Then there is a dual-digit POST display that will give you more detail on what exactly went wrong, and should it have been the DRAM, you can always try pushing the MemOK! switch, which should adjust the board in such a way as to make nearly any stick boot into the BIOS. In the past, this has worked very well for me, although there have been instances where even MemOK! didn't work, but that was usually a fault of the memory itself.


Naturally, there are a host of buttons and switches on the ASUS Z170-DELUXE that can help you test and configure your system, including buttons for CMOS clearing and flashing and switches for such hardware-based features as XMP support and EPU and TPU functionality.


How can I not like seeing TPU printed right onto the board's surface? Although it stands for Turbo Processing Unit, not TechPowerUp, these functions do power up your tech a bit, so we'll pretend they are one and the same. These features can easily be enabled via the TPU switch shown above, which has its own LED to indicate whether it has been enabled. There are three possible modes: OFF, TPU I, and TPU II.


There are also some supporting hardware controllers on the ASUS Z170-DELUXE, with two TPU chips on the Z170-DELUXE; one on the front and one on the rear.


VRM control is fairly standard for ASUS, with dual DIGI+/EPU ICs in charge of managing the CPU's power delivery.


DIMM power supply has it's own DIGI+/EPU chip as well as a dual-phase VRM design to ensure there is enough power to push those 3600 MHz+ memory speeds.


Monitoring functions and fan control are provided by the Super I/O shown above; it also adds a plug for on-board temperature, though there wasn't a cable to support it in the box.


There are not one but two Intel LAN controllers on the ASUS Z170-DELUXE, so all you Realtek and Qualcomm haters have nothing to complain about.


Added USB connectivity is provided by ASMedia parts.


There are two other ICs I found, one for enabling HMDI support and the other to enable the KeyExpress functions.


With the plastic shroud taken off (easily done by removing a few screws from the rear), you can see the VRM cooling all that much better. The huge silver cooler dominates the CPU socket, with the same esthetic on the PCH cooler.


The ASUS Z170-DELUXE's audio solution is built around a Realtek ALC1150. It's a pretty common CODEC that has seen both good and bad part designs support it, but if things are built well, it can be quite excellent.


Part of that design is to make sure there is enough filtering (the picture of the capacitors above) and no unwanted noise (the line of isolation through the PCB in the second picture), and I just have to say ASUS did good here. The RightMark Audio analyzer results will show that, of course, but believe me when I say that few onboard audio solutions match this one, if any.