Gadgetory

hello and welcome back to hardware unboxed why am I talking like this I don't know so let's just stop and get on with today's review which happens to be a review of as rocks fatalities in 270 gaming ITX / AC motherboard actually that's the box here's the motherboard I have to admit I do love mini ATX motherboards designed for high-end hardware they never seem to disappoint when it comes to PC building I'm at my happiest when I'm either building an incredibly large system and something like thermal takes the tower nine hundred or something small in say there's still verse own Raven RVs at O - maybe it's just me but I find it very satisfying building a high-end gaming rig in something the size of a shoebox and I'm not talking NBA player shoe box here either anyway as Rock snoozy 270 Mini ITX motherboard looks to be the perfect successor to their already great as it 170 version upgrades include Thunderbolt 3 support Intel octane technology creative Sound Blaster cinema 3 audio and better Wi-Fi integration of course you still get features such as USB 3.1 and ultra m2 all of this is crammed into a board measuring just 17 centimeters by 17 centimeters as was the case with the previous model as rock has gone with a black and red theme and this is common amongst all their fatality branded boards the majority of the board is black with the exception of the dual ddr4 dims and the heatsinks speaking of which the board is surprisingly heavy for its size and some of that is down to the fact that the board's VRMs are cooled via a rather thick heatsink which is connected to a smaller heatsink over the z170 chipset via a copper heat pipe for the most part the board's design and layout is excellent the power connectors are conveniently placed at the edge of the board along with the USB 3.0 header and two of the six SATA 6 gigabits per second ports there are also three for pin fan headers all placed at the top of the board for easy access the CPU socket is reasonably clear well actually for a small form-factor board there's loads of clearance for those trying to stuff a larger cooler into a mini ITX case helping to tidy up the board layout is a new Wi-Fi module previously asrock went with a mini PCI Wi-Fi card using a real tech controller which I felt was a bit of an oversight had they used an m2 card of the upgrade path would have been much broader anyway not making the same mistake twice we find an Intel dual bound wireless AC 72-56 adapter pre-installed this uses an MDOT to 2230 card supporting speeds at up to 867 megabits per second while it also supports Bluetooth 4.0 flipping the board over reveals an ultra m2 port supporting the 22 60 and 20 to 80 form factors m2 drives using either the SATA or PCIe interface are supported PCIe gen3 models can be fed up to 32 gigabits per second of bandwidth please note though if the m2 slot is occupied by a SATA type m2 device then the first SATA port will be disabled finally as you would expect nvme SSDs are supported as bhoot devices back on the front side of the board you will find a real tech alc 1220 codec providing 7.1 channel HD audio the implementation here does come with a huge list of extra features features such as the niche akan Feingold series audio caps 120 decibel SNR DAC with differential amplifier Ti any 5532 premium headset amplifier 4 front panel connectivity supporting 600 ohm headsets isolated PCB shielding individual PCB layers for the right and left audio channels gold audio connectors and support for creative Sound Blaster cinema 3 so that's a pretty impressive audio solution for a mini ITX motherboard so that pretty much covers all the important features let's take a look at that UEFI BIOS upon entering the BIOS the easy mode loads first and here you can find the basic information and options such as the processor type and frequency memory related information and system vitals such as the operating temperatures and fan speeds for experienced users it is possible to access the advanced bias by hitting f6 alternatively for future you can disable the easy mode and just bypass it entirely the main BIOS layout is very similar to what we have seen from these dead ones 70 bowlers featuring a fatality theme most of the fun will be had in the OC Tweaker menu though there are some useful things in the advanced and tool menus as well when it came time to have a clock I jumped into the OC Tweaker menu set the CPU ratio to all core and then raised the CPUs clock multiplier from 42 to 49 after that I entered the voltage configuration submenu and set the voltage mode to fixed and then applied 1.33 volts after that it was a simply a matter of saving the changes and rebooting the system now in Windows we had a 100% stable overclock of 4.9 gigahertz on the quad core Core i7 77 arcade processor not bad for a little ATX motherboard not bad at all finally I installed the samsung SSD 960 pro 1 terabyte in the m2 port on the underside of the motherboard and ran the a SSD benchmark the SSD performed as expected providing a read throughput of 2.8 gigabytes of a second with a write throughput of 2.1 gigabytes per second as for gaming performance so this little mini ITX motherboard will perform like any other z 270 or 170 motherboard and that's really true for any 100 series or 200 series motherboard actually that's a good size comparison there for the two boards that's in focus and in the shot nicely anyway for a long time now the chipset and by extension the motherboard haven't really been performance defining bits of kit ever since Intel released it was Sandy Bridge back in 2011 all the functions of the Northbridge now reside on the CPU things like the memory controller which used to impact performance and now all on the CPU this means unless you're testing multi GPU performance benchmarking your motherboards gaming performance is a bit pointless the other aspects of the Z 270 gaming ITX that I would have liked to test are the audio and wireless networking right now I don't have the correct gear or a database of results to compare with so this is something I'll have to add down the track for now though I think it's pretty clear that this little asrock motherboard is extremely capable I had no trouble pushing the core i7 77 K to a 100% stable overclock a 4.9 gigahertz and this matches the best frequency we've been able to achieve this process here yet the SSD performance was also very good I had no trouble getting ddr4 3,600 memory to work and that's the farthest memory I have on hand right now though asrock does state that the 4000 megahertz stuff works just fine as well at the time of putting this video together as rocks said to 70 gaming I Texas yet to go on sale the previous z170 model is selling for 175 dollars u.s. so I feel like if this one can come in for around that price then it's going to be great value overall I really do like this motherboard and I can't think of anything that I don't like or would change maybe a second m2 port on the back would be cool but I'm possibly being a bit greedy with that one anyway let me know what you guys think in the comments I'm your host Steve and I'll catch you on the next one