ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming AURA 3D Printed Preview

Introduction

Customisation is the new overclocking. It wasn’t that long ago that all your motherboards came equipped with enormous stickers proclaiming their prowess at managing to eke another 10MHz from your cheap CPU and every motherboard under the sun was the “P34 Turbo Overclocker Super Ninja Mk4”. Then, for reasons best left to the marketing guys, it wasn’t so much about the actual performance of your motherboard but about its ease of use. “Come and buy this one and we promise you’ll be up and running in approximately the same amount of time it takes your toaster to warm some pop tarts”.

With consoles now dominating the gaming market in a manner that makes us reminisce about the days we had to manually configure our AWE64 just to hear a slightly different beep to the one produced by the error speaker, so all modern motherboards have to be “Gaming”. A quick look through all the major manufacture efforts leaves us with the distinct impression that those aforementioned companies would be delighted if we’d all stop using Word or editing photos for our Flickr stream and get down to some proper, kept alive solely by caffeine and Wotsits, gaming.

All that means that a motherboard which proclaims its gaming capabilities is as uninspiring as a rice pudding for the lactose intolerant. We need something to get our mojo working. To whet our whistle. To make us sit up and pay attention. ASUS were the first on board the customisation train with their AURA lighting, allowing you to utilise RGB strips and even the LEDs on the motherboard itself to bring an array of changeable hues to your case internals. Like anything that is a) popular and b) easy/cheap to reproduce the RGB lighting has found its way into every other motherboard. ASUS aren’t one to rest upon their laurels though and that brings us neatly to the Z170 Pro Gaming with 3D Printing possibility.

Oh yes.

Specifications

At this point we could list the many things which the Z170 Pro Gaming has in its arsenal. However, as most of them aren’t unique to this particular motherboard but are available on all ASUS mid to high-end products and as you’re all shouting at your screens “enough of the USB 3.1 sockets, tell us more about the 3D Printing part”, we’ll oblige. Everyone interested in the precise overclocked DDR4 speeds available can stay here and peer through the table below. For the rest of us, onwards!