Conclusion

Allgemein		+	-
ASRock managed to leave a very good first impression with this motherboard. We like for instance the new design, where the heatsinks have been milled from solid aluminium add to the overall quality of the product. Other than that there are plenty of decent features for gamers. In this case you get a beefed up audio solution and regarding network you can manage traffic on application level, which is going to help you improve the gaming experience, especially if you've limited bandwidth. Furthermore we liked the fact, that there is an M.2 slot as well as a SATA Express port. In the end ASRock managed to put a little bit of everything on this board, which, keeping in mind, this is a board with a rather reasoanble price tag, makes it look really interesting.		- Design - Layout - Features
Layout		+	-
Basically the ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer's Layout has been well thought. On this motherboard the SATA ports as well as the one SATA Epxress port are located at the bottom edge of the motherboard and there are straigt connectors instead angled ones. Usually motherboard makers use angled ports these days. Unfortunately there is no power- and reset-button and there is also no debug LED. Placement of the PCI-Express x16 is well chosen. Between the first and the second PCI Express Gen 3.0 x16 slot there are two free slots which means that the first card in a SLI/CrossFire setup gets plenty of fresh air. Apart from that there is a PCI-Express x1 Slot inbetween the two x16 Slots. Close to the bottom edge there are two legacy PCI slots, which we would like to see replace with two PCI Express x1 slots. On another note we like the audio solution that got deployed on this board. There is a decent Realtek ALC1150 that got beefed up with an EMI shield as well as high-quality Nichicon caps offering decent audio quality.		- Space around the CPU socket - Audio Solution	- No Power/Reset-Buttons - No debug display - Legacy PCI Slots

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Layout
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 5 - Connectors and I/O
Page 3 - Features	Page 6 - Conclusion

Discuss this article in the forums

Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch Luca Rocchi l.rocchi@ocaholic.ch