ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 12.05.14Page:
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 |
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| 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 Express 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
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| Performance | + | - | Calculating the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks fifth and is therefore in the top of our 3D performance index, which also includes Z87 motherboards. When taking the average of all 2D results, the board ranks ninth in our charts. Maybe you noticed that especially SuperPi 32m is slow comparing to the old Z87 boards from ASRock. So far we're not sure if this will be the performance of the new Intel Z97 chipset or if it's related to the early BIOS and needs to be tweaked by ASRock's BIOS team. On another note we had a look at power consumption and we noticed the Fatal1ty Killer needs 59 Watts in idle and under load conditions we see 106 Watts. |
- 3D Mark Fire Strike - PC Mark Arithmetic Benchmark - UC Bench - Multimedia - Cryptography - Sleeping Dog High - Metro Last Night High - Power Consumption |
- Super Pi 32M - Wprime 1024M - SisSoft Sandra 2 |
| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| ASRock's new motherboard series all feature different color schemes and these color choices are also present in the BIOS. As we meanwhile expect from ASRock you get a BIOS which offers more than plenty of features and gamers will be happy they have lots of settings to play with. Apart from that we don't yet like the design too much. We would like it to be more discreet and the structure could be easier visible. We would really love to see ASRock rework it. | - Sheer amount of options | - Design | |
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| Should you be looking for a well equipped, Z97 based, motherboard for your gaming rig, with decent onboard audio which isn't to cost more than 125 Euro, then the ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer is going to be one of the best offers so far. | -
Price
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Gaming - Enthusiast - Overclocking |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASRock Fatal1ty Z97 Killer very good 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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