Gigabyte GA-Z270M D3H Motherboard Review

Installation

We placed the Core i5-6600K processor on to the motherboard, and then securely mounted the XSPC Raystorm Pro CPU waterblock on top. The whole motherboard was then carefully placed within the ID-Cooling Stream 2 chassis and we finished it off by adding our watercooling loop, which consists of ALL Thermaltake watercooling components. 

Everything fitted perfectly, albeit a little tight. I had enough room to add another Radeon graphics card if I wanted to, plus I have no issues with cabling … all is good.

The BIOS

Gigabyte’s BIOS on this motherboard isn’t the best I’ve come across. It might take some getting use to. However, it’s fully loaded for overclocking and performance tweaks. 

The motherboard also comes with Gigabyte’s DualBIOS …

“GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards feature GIGABYTE DualBIOS™, an exclusive technology from GIGABYTE that protects arguably one of your PC’s most crucial components, the BIOS. GIGABYTE DualBIOS™ means that your motherboard has both a ‘Main BIOS’ and a ‘Backup BIOS’, protecting users from BIOS failure due to virus, hardware malfunction, improper OC settings or power failure during the update process.”

Simple Options

If you want mild and easy overclocking, the Gigabyte BIOS allows you to do this by using their EZ OC option. It will automatically choose the best settings for maximum performance. It’s basically “Turbo Boost” … and for the Core i5-6600K … it will easily reach 4.2GHz.

Advanced Options

For overclockers and extreme enthusiasts who want to squeeze every ounce of power from the CPU and memory. Warning – Recommended only for use by experts.

So I decided to ditch the EZ OC options. Instead, I used the advanced options and was able to overclocked the Core i5-6600K to 4.5GHz with rock solid stability and NO voltage increases!