ASRock Z270 Extreme4 LGA1151 Motherboard Review

Software Overview

The company’s software package is really basic and devoid of many useful applications. As you can see, the main window lists Google Chome as a key asset and Norton Anti-Virus. Without trying to sound overly dramatic, Norton is an irritating piece of software which has consistent pop-ups whenever you launch a game or download files. During system reviews, it tends to interrupt benchmarks and cause inaccurate results. The App shop has an advert for an ASRock product but it’s too intrusive. Please note, the software suite might be better on release and include more tools, but I could only use what was provided on the motherboard disk.

On a more positive note, the BIOS and Driver tabs are extremely useful to quickly install the latest updates without having to search for each driver individually. This should save you a lot of time and ensure it’s really simple to keep a system up to date.

ASRock has included the XFast LAN program which is a traffic shaping solution and allows you to manage priorities of different applications. The traffic prioritisation could reduce latencies in games and provide essential information to monitor networking behaviour. Honestly, it’s probably the most useful tool bundled in the motherboard’s software package.

Interestingly, a traffic monitoring GUI is positioned in the system tray and lists key data.

The Restart to UEFI utility can be useful to directly reboot into the BIOS without relying on the BIOS key. If you have an ultra-fast NVMe boot SSD, it’s often difficult to press the BIOS function key in time which leads to a frustrating experience. Thankfully, the Restart to UEFI application solves this problem!

Unfortunately, the ASRock A-Tuning utility wouldn’t work on the motherboard despite trying both the X64 and X86 installers. This is a shame because it’s an application for altering the fan speeds, overclock frequencies and much more. Hopefully, the installer bug will be fixed for the launch and you’ll be able to use its full potential.