GIGABYTE AORUS GA-Z270X-GAMING 5 MOTHERBOARD

Intel’s new processors are arriving alongside updated chipsets. As the name of the Aorus Z270X Gaming 5 implies, it’s built around Intel’s new Z270 chipset (the highest-end of the new chipset bunch), so it’s worth taking a minute to cover the basics.

The 7th Generation of Intel’s Core chips marks the end of (or at the very least a pause in) Intel’s “tick-tock” production process for its Core processors. Until now, Intel’s releases were “ticks,” which featured more and smaller transistors, or “tocks,” which featured new microarchitectures. The new product path, as Intel describes it, is “process, architecture, optimization,” and Kaby Lake is the first of that new optimization step, using a refined version of the 14nm process introduced with Broadwell and continued with Skylake.