EVGA Z170 Classified Sub-Zero Overclocking Review
Conclusion
The EVGA Z170 Classified is a nice board that holds up under sub-zero quite nicely and can really push some decent numbers even with just dry ice. As I can’t currently get my dewars of LN2 in without carrying them 100 feet in the snow I am stuck using dry ice rice that I can easily carry in a cooler. When I can nearly top out my chip on dry ice and get some great results that is a win in my book. I have a run of the mill chip unfortunately and I am trying to find a nice one that has more potential. It became rock stable at 5.5GHz core and cache but the hard part was getting the memory to cooperate. As soon as the snow melts I will be testing the board and chip under some ln2 and bring the cold down to -170 and see just how far I will be able to go. I will definitely be making an update with the findings. I am hoping that down the line there will be some BIOS fixes that improve the performance of this board with Samsung D-Die memory as the RipJaws V that were used had some issues. There were issues with the board being able to run the memory at very tight timings or higher speeds. Compounding the problem is that there are not that many memory options to tweak so possibly tweaking my way out of the situation wouldn’t work. I have some B-Die I plan to test and make an update on for my findings with this board to see the difference in how it acts with B versus D. That should be down the road here soon, and there will be some more done with this board to come.
For now, the conclusion that I am drawing is that this is a damn fine board that may seem to be lacking in certain areas but does perform very well despite that. The board as I used it was certainly picky with D-Die Samsung, but with coaxing and a lot of patience the performance was decent. Though not what I could have gotten had I been able to run my timings really tight. If you plan to bench with a Skylake and a quad card setup there really is no other option that would be better that I can think of currently. If your plan is to use this board in your workstation or gaming rig you will not have to worry a bit about if the board is powerful enough for you.
