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ECS Z170-Claymore (LGA 1151) Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

This motherboard is nowhere to be seen with any of our recommended retailers or even online at all. MSRP is $160, so Europe can expect prices around the £120/ 150€ mark, which is great value for what this motherboard has to offer.

Overview

Just looking at the board itself, it’s not going to win first place compared to some of the more elaborate motherboard designs, but ECS tend to not fixate on looks with a simple MOSFET heat sink design and subtle chipset heatsink. This could be one way of keeping the overall production costs down, but I personally think the design is quite attractive with the open fins and copper touches. I would like to see more colour, maybe the ECS to be printed in copper style colours to break up the heavily black PCI area.

The low price would have you think that this motherboard can’t hold its own against the big hitters, but just looking at the results it shows that it is just not the case. It’s not the best motherboard we’ve had in terms of performance, but the price to performance ratio highly justifies that. Some of the results were extremely positive like the RAM bandwidth and wPrime CPU performance being some of the best results we’ve seen out of the Z170 range.

This motherboard was equipped with our first look at the Realtek Dragon (8118AS) ethernet option. Despite the hype revolving around it at Computex, I was not prepared for how well it would actually work. The Lan Speed Test benchmark provided poor results, but PassMark really opened the doors and provided some of the best results with some of the lowest combined CPU load we’ve seen so far. I think this ethernet option has a long way to go to become perfect, but this first look is extremely positive and a good sign of things to come.

The overclocking experience was simple. ECS has made adjustments to the BIOS to allow for simpler overclocking since my last experience and now it is as simple as MSI, Gigabyte or ASUS models. However, maintaining the overclock was difficult and required a higher voltage of 1.5v to hold 4.8GHz. Once the system was stable, the results achieved were among average, sitting right where it was expected to perform.

There is one thing that struck me as odd with this motherboard and that is the obvious lack of USB Type-C. I was led to believe that USB Type-C or Thunderbolt would be offered as standard by the Z170 range, yet this motherboard doesn’t offer either.

Pros