ASRock Z370M-ITX/ac Review
Published by Luca Rocchi on 30.01.18Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| It's quite obvious that the ASRock Z370M-ITX/ac is a product where the vendor is aiming for an attractive price point. This motherboard features a great looking design, which has been kept in black. Apart from that there are features like several 4-pin PWM headers and a decent storage solution. The ASRock Z370M-ITX/ac is currently listed on Geizhals for 124 Euro, which is perfectly reasonable considering the feature list. | -
Design - Layout |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| The layout of the ASRock Z370M-ITX/ac has been well thought. This model features six angled SATA connectors which can be found in the bottom right corner. Since the Z370M-ITX/ac is a mid-range motherboard, it's no surprise that there aren't any power- and/or reset-buttons. Apart from that we like the placement of the full-sized PCI-Express slot since isn't too close to the CPU socket. In addition there is one M.2 slot. This motherboard comes with a Realtek ALC892 chip which is a bit outdated, we would like to see a more recent ALC1150 or ALC1220 audio chip. | - Space around the CPU
socket
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- Realtek ALC892 | |
| Performance | + | - | |
At the moment our test setup includes five motherboards but during the next weeks we will add more models. Calculating the average of all benchmarks results we ran, we see that this board scores 5th. If we check a bit closer, we see that the ASRock Z370M-ITX/ac is about 4% slower than the ROG STRIX Z370-I Gaming in 3D Mark benchmarks. Furthermore, speaking about 2D performance, we see another bad result for the ASRock motherboard in Sisoft Sandra - Arythmetics suite. On another note, we had at energy efficiency where this board scores 1st. |
- Power consumption |
- 3D Performance | |
| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| ASRock has put a lot of time and effort into making their BIOS look nicer and more user friendly. Especially when we compare this version of ASRock BIOS to the first UEFI BIOS from ASRock, it simply cannot be compared, since the two are worlds apart. What's almost self-explanatory is that you get a lot of tuning and tweaking options in order to optimize the system towards your needs. We also like the entry screen which displays a lot of useful information. Apart from that overclocking our test CPU to 4.8 GHz was straight forward and there were no issues whatsoever. | - Sheer amount of
options |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| The ASRock Z370M-ITX/ac is a well equipped Z370 motherboard. At the moment this board isn't so quick according to our 2D and 3D benchmarks. We expect a better BIOS from ASRock that can improve the overall performance of this motherboard. On top of that it comes with a decent feature set and a price of 124 Euro excluding shipping costs, which makes it definitely affordable. | - Price | ||
| Rating | |||
| We give the ASRock Z370M-ITX/ac excellent 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
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