ASRock Z170 Extreme7+ Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 09.09.15Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| The Z170 Extreme7+ from ASRock is definitely an interesting board. Next to an attractive design in black and blue all the different connectors for storage media are interesting. Therefore it doesn't matter whether you want to connect standard SATA drives, drives with SATA Express connector or even M.2 SSDs. In case of the M.2 slots there is even an Ultra M.2 port offering up to 32 Gigabit per second of bandwidth (4 Gigabyte per second). On such a motherboard it's then almost standard there is a capable power design. The 12+2 phases with high-side and low-side on each driver MOSFET will guarantee stable power supply for the CPU as well as to the memory. On another note we one more like the audio solution. What you get is a Realtek ALC1150 with EMI shield and alongside the chip there are high-quality Nichicon capacitors | -
Design - Layout - Features - 3 x Ultra M.2 Slot |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Basically the ASRock Z170 Extreme7+'s Layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons. There is also a debug display which is very useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. The placement of the PCI-Express x16 is very well chosen. Between the first and the second PCI Express x16 slot there are two free slots which means that the first card in a SLI/CrossFire setup gets plenty of fresh air. Another detail we liked is the position of the first PCI-Express x1 slot, that has been located right above the first PCI-Express x16 Gen 3.0 slot. This ensures, that you always have a free x1 slot that can be equipped and apart from that there is also enough clearance to easily plug in and remove graphics cards, even if there are large coolers in CPU heatsinks in place. | - Angled SATA connectors
- Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Space around the CPU socket - Audio Solution |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board comes in last. In the case of the average 2D values the Extreme7+ ranks second to last. We're sure, ASRock is going to release a number of BIOS updates in order to increase the performance of this board. We also had a look at power consumption and we were surprised to see how efficient this board is. Especially in idle power consumption is very low. | - Power consumption | - 3D Performance - 2D Performance |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| ASRock has a beautiful looking BIOS when it comes to their new Z170 motherboards. The UEFI BIOS gets a black background and there are a few additional blue design elements. Meanwhile it's almost normal that a BIOS is absolutely complete offering countless features. If you're looking for overclocking options you'll find a great many of them and they are equally practical for novices as well as experienced overclockers. We always love the pre-defined profiles, which make overclocking quite a bit more efficient. Boosting our CPU to 5.0 GHz was absolutely no problem at all. | - Sheer amount of
options - Design |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The ASRock Extreme7+ is an excellently equipped Z170 motherboard, which would benefit from some performance improvements every here and there. Currently this board sells 253 Euro and at that price we can highly recommend it. | -
Price
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Gaming - Enthusiast - Overclocking |
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| Rating | |||
| The ASRock Extreme 7+ receives good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
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