A Closer Look
In terms of design, the motherboard isn’t exactly full of surprises. It looks like their previous Z270 motherboards and in all honestly, the features are about the same too. That being said, if it ain’t broken, don’t fit it. This is still a stunning looking motherboard, and one of the coolest looking Z370 motherboards you’ll find right now.
Overclockers rejoice, as the Z370 board comes with a very robust looking power delivery and conditioning stage. If you want to hit 5 GHz and beyond on your new 8700K, and you want to run your system hard for extended periods, this is the kind of hardware you want on your motherboard for added peace of mind and stability.
Rear I/O Guard
Keeping everything looking neat and tidy is this lovely extended rear guard. It covers some of the VRM cooling and the backplate of the board, giving it a more flowing and unique appearance.
The DDR4 slots benefit from the high quality caps too, as do all major components on the motherboard. Again, this should allow for more stable and reliable round the clock performance from your system. In terms of connectivity, there’s certainly plenty of it. The board has two USB 3.0 connectors on the right side.
It also has 8 x SATA 6 ports, meaning you’ll have no issues hooking up loads of hard drives or SSDs in RAID.
Not one, but two M.2 drive mounts. Of course, you can also use Optane drives on these for super fast drive caching.
More Ports!
The list just keeps going too, with a plethora of USB ports, fan connections, RGB lighting headers, and more along the bottom row.
Isolated audio hardware, and gold capacitors to help deliver the best sound possible.
Armour!
More graphics cards are often extremely thick and heavy, so you’ll be glad to see that two of the slots are reinforced and nicely spaced, so you should be able to pair up any of the biggest cards on the market.
Rear I/O
Hiding behind that shroud, you’ll find 6 USB ports, including a 3.1, and Type-C. There are no USB 2.0 ports though, not that it matters. There’s a lot of display options too, with VGA, DVI, and HDMI all accounted for.
Cool review! Looking forward to replace my old rig with new 8700k cpu for my wedding photography / videography editing.
Now, became more difficult to choose MB. Apparently there are big difference in speed.
http://www.lightscript.co.nz
Sounds I found MB to buy. Looking forward to replace my old rig with new 8700k cpu for my wedding photography / videography editing.
Still it is not clear why results have such a big difference if they use same CPU and Z370 chip.
http://www.lightscript.co.nz
Did you leave MCE enabled for those benchmarks? It really screws with the scores, and is likely why the ASUS boards are ahead. They are basically auto-overclocked on the stock benchmarks, making it not truly the same scenario. To make it even, you could have just enabled or disabled MCE on every board.
What I want to know is if the Creative Cinema3 sound on the Fatal1ty is any better than the sound on the Extreme4 or not. Since they use the same codec surely it’s just a software add?
Also neither board has onboard wifi whereas the Taichi has dual band wifi.
I decided I want an asrock board but which one.
Also the Fatal1ty and Taichi have debug and reset switches where the extreme4 does not
Does this motherboard have good overclocking abilities? If yes, then it’s probably the best motherboard you can get in terms of value tbh.