After watching a few JJ videos on Z170 builds and various features of the new Asus boards, I chose the Asus Z170A MB for my new build, which consists of a Fractal Define S case, Seasonic Snow Silent 750 Power supply, Asus Z170A, I7-6700K, Noctua CPU Cooler [NH-U12S], Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4 DRAM 2400MHz, EVGA GeForce GTX 960, and Samsung 950 PRO -Series 512GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD. A second SSD and a mechanical HD for storage were added later, once everything was up and running.
Here’s my experience. Putting it all together in the Fractal Define S was a delight: room to spare, and great organization - for my needs a brilliant case, and dead silent ,even with 2 more Fractal fans added to the front (be aware there’s no place for an optical drive if that’s something you need). All a delight that is, except for the slight matter of getting the motherboard to fit into the truly abysmal I/O shield that Asus provides. Shame on you Asus!
First push on the power button and all was well except no monitor. I had put the graphic card in the 3rd slot down. Manual says 1st slot is preferable. Turns out it was mandatory.
So we load Windows 10 from a purchased USB thumb drive. In 10 minutes all done. Load drivers copied from Asus site from a thumb drive (since no optical drive on this build). Once the Intel Ethernet drivers are loaded, attempt to go to Norton site to activate one of my licenses. Now all hell breaks loose, so to speak. Browser refused to go to any site except Microsoft. Google.com is declared unsafe. So too Mozilla, and all others except Microsoft web page. So I load Norton from a thumb drive and attempt to run it. It declares the license is expired, but proves unable to get to the Norton site to correct that. After many attempts to resolve this, I decided to try a bios update, as the motherboard came with a really old one (4 or 500 series). Being tired by this time I got lazy and used the easy way, which lets the motherboards find the bios on the Asus site and download and update automatically. Usually I put the new bios on a usb thumb drive and flash it in bios, and likely always will going forward. This time it seemed to do everything fine. But when it rebooted it went into a boot loop. It stared to boot, but after a few seconds turned off and then started again, and would continue to do this forever. I tried the Asus procedure for recovering the bios. It did not work. I tried clearing CMOS. It did not work. I went to sleep.
Next morning I pried out the CMOS battery with a watch screwdriver (was able to do it without removing the CPU cooler) and let it sit 10 – 15 minutes while researching on another computer. I then shorted the CMOS pins for 10 sec or so, put the battery back in, and it booted into bios, where I had to play around a little to get it on second try to load Windows. Now I could use Norton, run a scan, and load my favorite programs from the web. Don’t have an explanation for all this, but would love to hear from someone who does.
No other problems since. But even though my M2 drive shows read speeds >2500 MB/s and write speeds of >1500 MB/s my boot times are around 26-28 seconds, no faster than my 5-year-old Sabertooth/Sandy Bridge system. And certainly not the 10 sec that JJ demonstrated on You Tube with his build. Perhaps a more recent bios (they are several) might help. But after my last experience, I am hesitant to try that.
Update 2-29-16: Computer ran normally for awhile, then experienced a failure to boot - hung on boot. This is an issue I had with a previous MSI build that drove me back to ASUS. So that pushed me to try updating the bios once more. This time I downloaded the bios file (v1702) to a usb thumb drive. Did it proceed normally. Not by my standards. But with some finessing it updated successfully and now boots in around 20 sec. Plenty fast enough for me. Lets see how it holds up with time.
Update: 8-8-16: No further issues. Stable and trouble-free since last update.
| 品牌 | ASUS 华硕 |
|---|---|
| 制造商 | ASUS Computer International Direct |
| 商品尺寸 | 26.42 x 6.86 x 32.77 cm; 1.2 公斤 |
| 电池 | 1 锂金属电池 需要电池。 |
| 制造商是否已停产 | 不是 |
| 形状大小 | ATX |
| CPU 核心数 | LGA 1151 |
| 存储技术 | DDR4 |
| 内存类型 | DDR4 SDRAM |
| 最大支持内存容量 | 64 GB |
| 内存主频 | 3866 MHz |
| HDMI端口 | 1 |
| 是否包含电池 | 不是 |
| 电池包装类型 | 电池是装配在该商品内 |
| 电池锂含量 | 0.11 克 |
| 锂金属的数量 | 1 |
| 商品重量 | 1.2 kilograms |
