ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Professional Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 11.10.13Conclusion
| Allgemein | + | - | |
| The first
impression the OC Formula from ASRock makes us want more. Like with the
predecessor we like the individual design of this board, which actually isn't that
easy to achieve anymore. Since ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and co finally found
out that people, especially in the western part of this world, prefer
simple and decent color designs, quite a lot of color combinations have
already been chosen. The ASRock Z87 Fatal1ty is a motherboard that really targets extreme overclockers, but nevertheless ASRock succeeded in crafting a product that is equally attractive to the guys handling LN2 or watercooling/aircooling setups. Both worlds will be able to squeeze maximum out of their systems using this board. Apart from overclockers also gamers and modders will enjoy this board, since there is a beefed up audio solution and the chipset can be integrated into a custom water cooling loop. |
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Design - PCI-Express 3.0 Slots - 10x SATA3 (6Gbps) - Chipset Watercooling - Audio |
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| Layout | + | - | |
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Basically the ASRock Z87 Fatal1ty'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 in this case features a high resolution display. Even the placement of the PCI-Express x16 is well chosen. There is a total of four of these slots and between two slots there is always an empty slot. We think this is a good number of PCI Express x16 slots for a overclocking/gaming motherboard altough most gamers will never use four graphics cards in their build. But still it leaves you with plenty of options if you want to plug in other expansion cards. Overclockers will also like the voltage readouts and we're quite sure overclockers will really enjoy the conformal coating layer, which basically makes this board waterproof. |
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Angled SATA
connectors
- Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Space around the CPU socket - Voltage readouts - Watercooling - OC Buttons - Conformal Coating |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Calcualting the average of all 3D and 2D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks in the center span in case of 3D performance and at the end of the tables in case of 2D performance. Especially in 2D we would like this board to be a bit faster. In case of 3D the performance is ok. On another note we had a look at power consumption and in this case we see that this board draws surprisingly little power. |
-SiSoft Sandra Memory latency
- Super Pi 1M - Bioshock: Infinite High Res - Metro Last Light High Res - Sleeping Dogs Low Res |
- 3DMark Fire Strike - SiSoft Sandra Arithmetik - SiSoft Sandra Multimedia - SiSoft Crytography - SiSoft Sandra Memory bandwidth - SiSoft Sandra Memory and cache access - Sleeping Dogs High Res |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| As we meanwhile expect from ASRock you get a BIOS which offers more than plenty of features. Gamers will be happy that they can manipulate a lot of settings. Apart from that we don't yet like the design of the BIOS too much. We would really love to see ASRock overwork it completely and give it much more decent looks. | - Sheer amount of options | - Design | |
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| Should you be looking for a gaming motherboard with an excellent price, then the ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Professional is a great choice. | -
Overclocking - Enthusiast - Gaming |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Professional good 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
| Navigate through the articles | |
ASUS Z87-Deluxe Dual Review |
ASUS Gryphon Z87 Review
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