The Board - Layout

The ECS Z170-CLAYMORE has a nice quality feel to it in my hands, the simple esthetic design with just a few color highlights on the heatsinks a great indicator of what this board has on offer. Since there's not much more here than what the Intel Z170 platform itself has to offer, both front and rear are simple.


The socket area is dominated by rather large coolers. With SkyLake CPUs drawing minimal amounts of power, the heatsinks seem a bit overkill, but keeping the power area well-cooled will have power delivery remain efficient in even the most demanding climates.


There are only fully sized PCIe x16 slots on the ECS Z170-CLAYMORE; five in total. There are varying electrical configurations based on which of the slots are populated. A handy guide ECS printed right onto the PCB's surface can help you decide where to install your hardware. The M.2 slot is between the two uppermost PCIe slots, ready for 2242, 2260, or 2280 form-factor devices.


The rear I/O connectivity is better than expected, with a large number of USB ports dominating the area. With 10 ports in total (four USB 2.0, four USB 3.0, and two USB 3.1), the remaining area only has room for the LAN port, audio I/O, PS/2 plugs, and HDMI and DisplayPort. SATA connectivity totals 6 drives internally. Two of these ports combine to provide the SATA Express port, which leaves you with four ports for SATA devices.


The board's bottom edge has the usual stuff; more USB 2.0 headers, audio pins, a TPM header, etc. It's worth noting that if you do use one of these USB 2.0 headers, it's best to choose the gray header as it's the one optimized for charging support.