Biostar Racing Z170 GT7 Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. Biostar Racing Z170 GT7: Packaging and Bundle3. Biostar Racing Z170 GT7: Layout and Examination4. Biostar Racing Z170 GT7: UEFI5. Biostar Racing Z170 GT7: Software6. Testing Methodology7. Tests: CPU-related8. Tests: Memory-related9. Tests: GPU-related10. Tests: Motherboard-related11. Overclocking12. Conclusion13. View All Pages

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark is a Windows-based utility for testing storage performance of any storage drive or controller. We use the default benchmark setup and run this on an OCZ Trion 150 SSD directly connected to the SATA ports and then again over a USB 3.0 port using a USB 3.0 to SATA III adapter.

Chipset SATA and USB performance was also as-expected.

Rightmark Audio Analyser

Rightmark Audio Analyser is a freeware benchmarking utility designed to objectively test the performance characteristics of audio solutions. We setup a line-in line-out loop and execute the record/playback test before generating the results report you see below. This test was run at 24bit audio depth and 192KHz frequency.

Biostar's Racing Z170 GT7 uses ALC898 which is slightly better than ALC892 (MSI Z170A Tomahawk) but slightly worse than ALC1150 (all other motherboards on test) which fully explains the benchmark results we observed. The audio performance is very good, and helped by the amplifiers, though we think the price point should have entailed the use of the ALC1150 codec.

Power Consumption

We leave the system to idle on the Windows 10 desktop for 5 minutes before taking a reading, for CPU load results we run Cinebench and take a reading in the middle of the render progress.

Power consumption is par for the course.

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