The ASRock Fatal1ty Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac Motherboard Review
by E. Fylladitakis on September 19, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- ASRock
- Mini ITX
- Z270
- 7700K
- Z270 Gaming ITX/ac
The ASRock Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac Review
Test Bed and Setup
Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives, in essence, an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency/monitoring priority, overriding memory sub-timings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.
The ASRock Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac is one of the few motherboards that we have reviewed recently that has multi-core acceleration disabled by default. The FCLK frequency is set to 800 MHz by default as well and all current/temperature limiters are enabled and set to their default settings.
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-7700K (ES, Retail Stepping), 91W, $340 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 4.2 GHz (4.5 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | ECS Z270H4-I Durathon 2 |
| Cooling | Alphacool Eisbaer 240 |
| Power Supply | Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory | G.Skill DDR4-2400 C15 2x16 GB 1.2V |
| Memory Settings | XMP @ 2400 |
| Video Cards | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) |
| Hard Drive | Crucial MX200 1TB |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
Thank you to Crucial for providing us with MX200 SSDs. Crucial stepped up to the plate as our benchmark list grows larger with newer benchmarks and titles, and the 1TB MX200 units are strong performers. Based on Marvell's 88SS9189 controller and using Micron's 16nm 128Gbit MLC flash, these are 7mm high, 2.5-inch drives rated for 100K random read IOPs and 555/500 MB/s sequential read and write speeds. The 1TB models we are using here support TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE-1667 (eDrive) encryption and have a 320TB rated endurance with a three-year warranty.
Further Reading: AnandTech's Crucial MX200 (250 GB, 500 GB & 1TB) Review
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU. The AX1200i was the first power supply to offer digital control and management via Corsair's Link system, but under the hood it commands a 1200W rating at 50C with 80 PLUS Platinum certification. This allows for a minimum 89-92% efficiency at 115V and 90-94% at 230V. The AX1200i is completely modular, running the larger 200mm design, with a dual ball bearing 140mm fan to assist high-performance use. The AX1200i is designed to be a workhorse, with up to 8 PCIe connectors for suitable four-way GPU setups. The AX1200i also comes with a Zero RPM mode for the fan, which due to the design allows the fan to be switched off when the power supply is under 30% load.
Further Reading: AnandTech's Corsair AX1500i Power Supply Review
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory. G.Skill has been a long-time supporter of AnandTech over the years, for testing beyond our CPU and motherboard memory reviews. We've reported on their high capacity and high-frequency kits, and every year at Computex G.Skill holds a world overclocking tournament with liquid nitrogen right on the show floor.
Further Reading: AnandTech's Memory Scaling on Haswell Review, with G.Skill DDR3-3000
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41 Comments
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Gothmoth - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
would love anandtech doing a in-depth VRM analysis like some youtube chanels do....i can read the specs myself on the manufacturer website.
spend some of that time on more useful things.
peterfares - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
Why is there a SATA Express? I guess you can use it to connect U.2 drives right? But only at 2 lanes?DanNeely - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
Probably equal parts design inertia, the sockets are cheaper than 2x sata because obsolete, and to support USB3.1g2 front panel devices. The latter needs 2 lanes of PCIe, so 1x slots aren't a good fit like for adding other forms of IO.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
It was sort of a cheap bandaid solution to the problem of SATA 3.0 bottlenecking contemporary SSDs that has never and probably won't ever take off since we now have M.2 interfaces instead. The idea was to quickly and cheaply double SATA 3.0 speeds in a backwards compatiable manner. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on it here if you want to know more:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA_Express
OFelix - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
I have the Z170 and used the feature to submit a support ticket direct from the BIOS.I was pleasantly surprised to receive a quick response from tech support.
On the Z170 I found that one of the fan headers would not allow speed control. Hopefully that has been fixed (review says that all fan headers support PWM).
Question: What devices could I buy today to use with SATA Express? Is it intended as internal or external expansion?
I want to build a system with multiple "personalities" by plugging in different external boot drives would thunderbolt or SATAe be suitable/better for this?
Thanks
Oxford Guy - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
Good luck getting them to patch the BIOS for that board to fix the hyperthreading crash bug.Intel released the code to board makers in April. Here we are with AsRock sitting on its thumb.
punjabiplaya - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
I've been running this board in my main rig since it launched. i7 7700k and a GTX1080 in a fractal nano. It's great.The_Assimilator - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
Damn, that Thunderbolt chip is literally physically larger than the USB C port it's used for. Intel needs to slim that mofo way down if they want to fit it in the CPUs and/or south bridges, because that's the only way TB is ever gonna gain traction.DanNeely - Wednesday, September 20, 2017 - link
Yup. One of the reasons why really high speed IO is expensive, TB3 wasn't built into chipsets from the start, and why not all chipset USB ports are the fastest possible version is that doing it needs lots of transistors which means a relatively large amount of die size. You can see the same thing with USB3 only cards where the USB controller itself is the same size as the USBC port.ex
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/ASM1142-C...
only1jva - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
I've owned this motherboard since March and it has begun to fail on me. After playing games like Civilization 6 and Xcom 2, the PC will completely freeze. After powering it down by holding down the power switch, I am unable to power it back on as the machine will turn on briefly then immediately shut down. It repeats this cycle over and over again. I have to wait half an hour to an hour before it turns back on completely.I'm running an i7-7700k AIO watercooler from Corsair, Asus GTX 1080, Corsair case. Not sure what the problem is with this thing but even if I can get into BIOS, it will freeze while in the BIOS screen. I've also tried all the released firmware versions for this board, they all behave the same.
so yeah, never trusting ASRock again.