Colorful Plots Return To US Motherboard Market With iGames Z170 YMIR-G

Colorful (aka Chaintek) has produced and sold motherboards for several years in foreign markets such as China and India. Colorful has attempted to break into the U.S. market several times before, but it has thus far been unsuccessful. The company hasn’t given up, though, and it will soon ship a new high-end enthusiast motherboard to the United States: the iGame Z170 YMIR-G.

The iGame Z170 YMIR-G is targeted at both gamers and overclockers. The board is primarily black, with red highlights. There are a few LED lights placed on the board that can illuminate red, blue or green.

Colorful said the motherboard can support up to 125 W TDP Skylake processors, even though commercially available desktop Skylake processors max out with a TDP of 91 W.

The board uses a 14-phase power delivery system that is cooled by a massive heatsink. This heatsink also has connections for a liquid-cooling solution, which will enable overclockers to push the board even further by water cooling the board’s power regulation circuitry and MOFSETs. Naturally, as it’s intended for overclockers, the motherboard supports two BIOS ROMs to prevent an unstable overclock from bricking the system.

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Most of the motherboard is also covered by heatsinks in an effort to keep the system cool while overclocking. These heatsinks can be unscrewed from the front of the board for regular cleaning and maintenance.

The iGame Z170 YMIR-G features a fairly common series of storage connections. There are six SATA-III (6 Gbps) ports as well as two Sata Express (16 Gbps) ports mounted on the right-side of the board.

There is just one M.2 Key M (32 Gbps) port, which is hidden beneath one of the heatsinks. On a high-end motherboard like this targeted at enthusiasts, we would typically like to see at least two of these ports, so the iGame Z170 YMIR-G is a little lacking here.

The motherboard also features a relatively high-end audio solution, with a Realtek ALC1150  audio codec placed on a segmented portion of PCB and covered by an EMI shield. The audio chip is connected to a series of high-quality Nichicon capacitors, which should help to reduce ripple and improve the SNR of audio played through the codec.

Colorful opted to install two RJ-45 ports on the board; one is powered by a Killer E22001 NIC, whereas the other one is connected to an Intel i211 controller.

The board is priced at $302 and should be available soon on Amazon. If this board is successful in the U.S. market, Colorful will attempt to capitalize by releasing a wider range of its motherboards, graphics cards and SSDs.