While we have discussed a few high-end skylake motherboards in the past, those were mostly intended for overclockers and case modders. Today we will discuss three new high-end boards from three manufacturers: Asus, Supermicro and MSI.

The most surprising name in this list is Supermicro. This manufacturer whom we mostly know from their server-motherboards wants to fight its way onto the consumer market through the unofficial slogan ''consumer motherboards of server grade quality''. The C7Z170-OCE is marketed towards overclockers and other consumers with high requirements. Naturally, we are highly interested in what Supermicro has to offer.

Besides that, we also incorporated a new version of the ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme and the MSI Z170A Gaming M9 Ack into our comparison test. The latter is not particularly targeted at overclockers and is, for example, a competitor to the ASUS Z170-Deluxe, while the Maximus VIII Extreme Assembly brings, among other things, a new colour scheme and a 10Gbit-networking card to the table.