Asus Prime Z270-A Review: The feature-rich motherboard, classic looks, excellent performance

Asus is very popular among hardware enthusiasts and it has come up with yet another motherboard with advanced technology that supports latest CPUs from Intel. We recently reviewed another Asus motherboard TUF Z270 Mark 1 that also supports the LGA-1151 socket. Asus Prime Z270-A has various similarities with its other siblings as it has Aura Sync. It also supports DDR4 3866MHz, dual M.2, Intel Optane memory ready, HDMI, SATA 6Gb/s and has USB 3.1 Type-C. It supports 3D-printed parts, with dedicated 3D mount for easy installation, which means it's ready for the future as well.

Classic looks with loads of features

The motherboard looks classic and it comes with Asus 5-Way optimization feature to boost the system performance based on real-time usage. It has many fan slots that can keep the system cool with more fans with more users. Additionally, you get complete control over fans as it’s configurable via Fan Xpert 4 and UEFI BIOS. It boasts a dedicated integrated circuit to protect each fan header from over-temperature and overcurrent.

The Prime has a dedicated base-clock generator designed for 7^th Generation Intel processors enabling base clock frequencies up to or beyond 425 MHz. The Prime supports the latest Intel Optane Memory technology to accelerate the boot and reduce load time. It comes with x4 PCI Express 3.0/2.0 bandwidth, M.2 supports up to 32Gb/s data transfer speeds, enabling faster boot, load and processing.

Asus Prime Z270-A is backed by graphical BIOS featuring two modes – easy and advanced. The BIOS lets you configure and manage the machine as per the requirement.

Marvellous performance

We set up the prime motherboard using Intel Core i7-7700K processor (up to 4.5 GHz clock speed, 8M cache, 4 cores, 8 threads, processor graphics), 8 GB Zion DDR4 SDRAM, 4GB Gigabyte GPU and Hitachi 500GB HDD.

We used the PC for more than three weeks to check its real-life performance while using it for day-to-day tasks. We ran multiple applications including MS office and browsed the internet. It managed them quite easily.

To go beyond, we ran two browsers, Chrome and Mozilla, with more than 20 tabs in each. Simultaneously, we operated MS office and some other applications. We were able to switch between apps without any performance issues.

Using the BIOS we did simple tweaks to check over-clocking capability. It was able to achieve 5000 MHz and performance was steady. We installed different games including Shadow of Mordor, Thief, NFS etc. to check its gaming performance. It handled them easily. Graphics and overall performance were great. We didn't notice any visible lag in the performance during the test. Moreover, we left one game running at the back and played another one. Still, only a slight delay was seen; otherwise it was running fine.