Building Our Latest Z170 Test Bench – Skylake & 64GB of DDR4 Memory!

FINAL THOUGHTS

Alright, so after putting our new rig through the gears, we saw that it performed very well. Thanks to the very easy-to-use UEFI BIOS by ASRock, we were easily able to achieve the 4.6GHz overclock, which the Corsair H100 CPU Cooler handled with ease. The CPU idles at around 30C, while when pushed through the benchmarks it would reach up to 66C, still well within what the CPU can handle.

What baffled us for the longest time was the memory and CPU combination, which as we started to research we found that this seems to be a more common issue. From our time with the i5-6600K and two different sets of DDR4 memory, our conclusion is that the i5 is not capable of handling 3000MHz across four sticks/32GB of DDR4 memory. Our testing, which included a lot of trial and error, showed us that it may handle 16GB (two sticks) at 3000MHz, but only when overvolted. For another test we took our 32GB DDR4-3000 kit and paired it with an i7-6700K, which we found that it ran fine. When we slapped in Crucial’s 64GB, four sticks, DDR4 memory running at 2133MHz, our i5 Z170 test bench  was unbelievably stable. So our recommendation, if you have the budget, go for the i7-6700K.

Our sincere thanks have to go once again to ASRock, Crucial, InWin and Zotac for supporting our latest test bench, this being the one of our best to date!

Feel free to comment with your thoughts or ideas on how we might improve this Test bench in the future.