Gigabyte X170-Extreme ECC (Intel C236) Motherboard Review

Bohs Hansen / 8 years ago

Final Thoughts & Pricing

Pricing

The Gigabyte X170-Extreme ECC is brand new at the time of writing and can as such be a bit tricky to get hold of until stock arrives everywhere. At the time of writing, I found the motherboard listed for $309.99 at NewEgg, £194.90 at Alternate UK, and €233,90 through Geizhals.

Overview

Right from the start, there is no doubt that the Gigabyte X170-Extreme ECC is an awesome motherboard. It comes packed full of quality features and is part of the Ultra Durable series of motherboards. This includes black solid capacitors and high-quality audio caps, among other things. Whether you like the camouflage design or not is probably a matter of personal taste, but I quite like it here. It isn’t as pushy and would fit well with coolers and fans such as those of Noctua’s.

The C236-based motherboard comes with all the newest connection standards and is also the first Thunderbolt 3 certified C236 motherboard. USB 3.1 Type-C and Type-A are both present for the newest portable devices. Dual Gigabit Ethernet allows the choice between a Killer E2400 and an Intel i219, but the two can sadly not be teamed – probably the only downside to this board. Internally there are multiple SATA-Express and even two M.2 slots that support both PCIe and SATA drives with up to 32Gbps each on top of the 8 SATA ports. Overall, a more than well-equipped motherboard that I’d use for a storage setup any day.

It also comes with a great audio solution by Creative Sound Blaster, supports 4K resolutions through HDMI 1.2 and DisplayPort from CPU-based iGPUs, and a lot more. The PCI-Express x16 slots got Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable metal shielding too. Quality components for a long lasting and great experience.

There isn’t much to say about the performance, except well done. Every aspect of the motherboard worked like a charm and brought in some great results – as we saw on the previous pages.

So whether you want to build a high-end storage server, use it with or without great overclocking features, workstation operations such as design – the Gigabyte X170-Extreme ECC will do a great job with its multi-GPU support, multi NGFF storage support, and dual BIOS. It does all that while it looks great and even adds extra lighting to your setup through its LED trace path. I’d switch my storage test bench motherboard in an instant for this one if my CPU would fit.

Pros:

Good performance
Great durability through great components
Thunderbolt 3 40Gbps and USB 3.1 10Gbps
Tripple SATA-Express 16Gbps
Dual M.2 32Gbps
Killer E2400 and Intel i219 NIC
Creative Audio
4K at 60Hz iGPU support
3-way GPU support

Cons:

Network chips can’t be teamed

“Gigabyte’s X170-Extreme ECC bring everything to the table in a beautifully crafted motherboard. If you want it, it supports it – and it priced very competitively.”