ASRock Extreme4 Z390 Motherboard Review

Peter Donnell / 6 years ago

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

The ASRock Extreme4 Z390 Motherboard is available now for around £173.97 from Amazon, although I have seen it a little more and a little less from a few retailers, so best to shop around for a good deal. It’s pretty competitive though, with many high-end boards costing £200 up to £400. However, it packs in a huge range of features that make it great value for those wanting extensive storage options.

Overview

The latest board from ASRock has a lot of great features on offer. Its main selling point is storage, with triple M.2 mounts giving you lost of high-speed storage for RAID, and even Optane configurations. If you’re building something that needs a lot more storage, eight SATA ports will certainly have you covered. Furthermore, USB Gen 1 and Gen 2 connections, as well as three front panel headers, you’re not going to be short of ports here.

Gaming

It’s not marketed as a gaming motherboard, but it’s got more than enough grunt to take on the competition here. It scored fantastically in 3DMark when we overclocked the CPU to 5 GHZ, our second highest ever score in fact! It’s not the most elite gaming motherboard ever, but the frame rates in our benchmarks were certainly competitive should you have the need.

Build Quality

It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some high-end models, but it’s got enough in the right places. For example, there’s only one M.2 shield, but it’s better than none. The DIMM slots aren’t armoured, but that’s hardly a deal breaker. There are two armoured PCIe lanes out of three, which is fine if you’re only using two heavy GPUs. The bulk of the budget seems to have gone into quality power delivery on this motherboard. A huge bank of capacitors and MOSFETS surround the CPU socket. When it comes to pushing an i9-9900K to its limits, this is what you want.

Should I Buy One?

Compared to some Z390 motherboards, this one doesn’t cost the Earth, yet still delivers a solid feature set and great build quality in all the right places. It’s ideal for overclocking and has more storage connection options than even most high-end workstations would require. If you need a complex and versatile Z390 motherboard without breaking the bank, this is the one for you!