ECS Z270-Lightsaber Motherboard Review

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A $200 MSRP puts the Z270-Lightsaber at odds with some major competition, including the ROG Strix Z270E Gaming from Asus. The $190 MSI Z270 Gaming M5 and $180 ASRock/Fatal1ty Z270 Gaming K6 round out our charts, using our complete Kaby Lake Test configuration to gauge performance and comparative overclocking capability.

(Note: Prices reflected immediately below are real-time, or dynamic prices and may not reflect the prices we quote in the text, which are based on MSRP.)

The range of Z270-Lightsaber’s overclock settings appears adequate in comparison to other boards, but its CPU core voltage is far less granular. We can’t imagine many people will be pleased to jump straight from 1.25V to 1.30V, particularly when some cores operate best from a heat-to-performance perspective at 1.28V.

Test System Configuration

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SoundIntegrated HD Audio
NetworkIntegrated Gigabit Networking
Graphics DriverGeForce 372.90


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Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.
  • Co BIY
    Who will be buying a Z270 at this point ?
    Reply
  • Crashman
    20227124 said:
    Who will be buying a Z270 at this point ?
    I don't know. We received it late, and I think it was probably an intermediate step towards ECS's Z370 version.
    Reply