ASRock Z370 Fatal1ty Gaming K6 Motherboard Review

Peter Donnell / 7 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The ASRock Z370 Gaming K6 Fatal1ty is available now with an MSRP of £172.99.

Overview

Intel has unleashed their Z370 unto the masses today, and so far, things are looking pretty good. I mean, if you liked Z270 and even bought a Z270 series motherboard, then you know exactly what to expect. For the most part, many of the new boards offer nothing that’s really new in the way of features. It’s a shame we needed a revised socket for the new 8th Gen CPUs due to their increased core count, but, it is what it is.

Overall though, the 8th Gen CPUs are pretty incredible, and while the ASRock Z370 Fatal1ty Gaming K6 motherboard isn’t the fastest Z370 we’ve tested, it’s hardly the slowest either. It has set some impressive benchmarks that give previous generation hardware a damn good run for their money and further shows that there is some value to be found in the Z370 platform.

Should I buy it?

The raw gaming performance is pretty good, not amazing, but it’s good. That being said, this motherboard has a lot to offer to PC gamers beyond what we’ve tested. For one, it has three armoured PCIe lanes, allowing you to mount three big, heavy, and brutally powerful graphics cards for an extreme gaming build. Even if you don’t, those armoured slots look cool anyway.

Extreme Hardware

With the 12 Power Phase, and that chunky VRM cooling and hardware, I’m confident this motherboard will maintain stable high overclocked 24/7, and that’s certainly an attractive feature for enthusiasts.

Other big performance enhancements come for the dual M.2 mounts and Optane support, as well as the most comprehensive storage and USB configuration we’ve seen from the Z370 range so far. If you’re hooking up vast amounts of devices, this motherboard has a lot to offer you.

There’s also the audio performance, and with an ALC1120 codec, as well as Purity Sound, and Sound Blaster Cinema 3, it’s got as good or better sound processing that anything else out there right now. That means you’re unlikely to need additional hardware to get the best sound from your speakers, or your headsets.

Finally, you also have dual LAN. For improving your network transfer speeds, reducing ping times, or even having a fallback connection for reliability, it’s a nice thing to have. For gamers, it’s a great thing to have, but also practical for high-end systems on a day-to-day basis too.