Asus Z170i Pro Gaming Review

Overclocking and EFI

We had our reservations pushing things too far, but the power circuitry is well catered-for cooling wise, so when 4.6GHz proved to be no problem, we went for 4.8GHz too. Amazingly, not only were things stable but like other Asus Z170 boards we've seen, the Z170i Pro Gaming didn't need a sky-high voltage either, with just 1.32V needed for perfect stability. 4.9GHz was a bridge too far despite booting into Windows and even ramping up the vcore to 1.48V with maximum loadline calibration didn't help - an excellent result though.

The EFI is quite familiar in that it simply looks and feels like a cut-down version of a full-on ROG EFI. There are a few omissions, such as SSD Secure Erase, but on the whole this is a great EFI with a particularly good fan control suite that actually allows you to switch off case fans according to the temperature - a feature that's lacking on many of the Z170i Pro Gaming's competitors.

There's a front-end, much like MSI's EFIs now, but a quick tap of F7 brings you to the main menu where you can drag your most-used settings into a My Favourites section for quick access, or just head to the AI Tweaker section, where all the usual overclocking settings are. You get a real-time readout of the voltages too - something that's also missing sometimes from the competition. That said, most of us will just need to tweak the vcore.