A fine balance between price and features? The Intel Skylake platform was released over a month ago. Bringing minor gains in CPU performance but offering a whole host of extra features on the chipset, such as additional bandwidth and explicit support for NVMe, upgrading to the Z170 platform makes a lot of sense for users looking for a new system in mid-2015.

Championing the chipset is ASRock, who has no fewer than 17 Z170-based motherboards in its arsenal. Sitting near the top of the stack is the Z170 Extreme 6 that's priced at around £150. ASRock goes above and beyond the base chipset specification by adding a number of extra features that, it says, are primed for the enthusiast, so let's take a look.