ASRock Reveals Z170M OC Formula Motherboard

ASRock has revealed a nice-looking micro-ATX variant of its flagship socket LGA1151 motherboard, namely the Z170M OC Formula, which features some rather impressive overclocking features. The first thing you might notice when you have a look at this product for the first time is that it offers just two DDR4 DIMM slots even though its form factor could have supported another pair. That’s because ASRock has decided to utilize the PCB real-estate on more reliable electrical components. The motherboard draws power from a mix of 24-pin ATX and 8-pin EPS connectors, and it makes use of a 14-phase VRM in order to condition that power for the CPU.

The 10-layer PCB used for the Z170M OC Formula greatly reduces overall electrical interference, which is always a big plus. Since it was designed with overclocking in mind, this product features onboard clock fine-tuning buttons as well as DirectKey auto-overclocking controls and a system that allows manual switching between two redundant firmware EEPROM chips. Other highlights include a HyperBClk Feature, which ensures finer control over the base clock. When it comes to expansion slots and storage, the motherboard comes with two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, one 32 Gb/s M.2 slot and eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports that create two 16 Gb/s SATA-Express connectors. A pair of USB 3.1 ports and eight USB 3.0 ports are also a part of the package, not to mention the Intel gigabit Ethernet interface and the Purity Audio 3 solution.