ASRock Z87M Extreme4 Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 29.10.13Page:
Conclusion
| Overall | + | - | |
| At a first glance the Z87M Extreme4 definitely leaves a very good impression. At an attractive price, a little bit north of 100 Euro you get a convincing feature mix as well as decent components. Additionally this board turned out to be surprisingly efficient regarding power consumption. In this case one could even build efficient office PC's based on the Z87M Extreme4. | - Layout - mATX |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Basically the ASRock Z87M Extreme4's Layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors. Unfortunately there are no power- or reset-buttons and there also isn't a debug LED. Regarding the PCI-Express x16 slots there we have nothing to complain about. A closer look at the area around the CPU socket shows, that there is plenty of space to install big aircoolers without running into any issues. | - Angled SATA connectors - Space around the CPU socket | - No Power/Reset-Button onboard - No debug display | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Let's first have a closer look at overall 3D performance. Calcualting the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks in the center span of our comparison tables. Concerning the average of all 2D performance results it again ranks in the center span. Furthermore, when we dig deeper into the individual results, we see that there were a few glitches. On another note we were actually surprised about the power consumption of this board. We didn't expect it to be this energy efficient. In case of idle testing the Z87M Extreme4 achieves an excellent first place and in case of load testing it's been able to score a third place, which means that the Z87M is one of the most efficient boards we've had for testing so far. This result is also the reason why recommend this board for environments, where computing has to be as energy efficient as possible. | -
3DMark Ice Storm - SiSoft Sandra Artithmetic - SiSoft Sandra Multimedia Floating Point - Cinebench R11.5 |
- 3DMark Fire Strike - SiSoft Sandra Cryptography AES256 - SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth - SiSoft Sandra Memory and Cache access |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| As we meanwhile expect from ASRock you get a BIOS which offers more than plenty of features. It's possible to manipulate virtually everything you can possibly think of. Apart from that we didn't like the design of the BIOS. We would really love to see ASRock rework it completely and give it much more decent looks. | - Amount of options | - Design | |
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| Should you be looking for a solid mATX motherboard, which features an attractive price point, then the Z87M Extreme4 is a good choice. | -
Enthusiast build - Gaming - Office/Desktop |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASRock Z87M Extreme4 very good 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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