ASRock X370 Gaming Professional Fatal1ty review - Conclusion

The Final Words

So this is the 4th X370 we have tested. And although I do not have a brand preference I do have to state that I like the X370 Gaming Professional board probably the best of them all. And that's a lot for me to say as really, everybody knows how I feel about Fatal1ty branding. ASRock simply did it right with this one. If, for example, I take the similarly priced MSI X370 XPower and compare it with this one, then here we have two Ethernet jacks, one of them is even 5 Gbit/s ready. ASRock also added a secondary M.2 slot and it is the first X370 motherboard that actually comes fitted with dual-band AC WIFI. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that XMP mode worked on our memory, we flicked a switch and boom, we had the memory running at 2933 MHz without any extra configuration. Now, I also have to state that you might not be as lucky with a different set of DIMMs, but still everything about this motherboard feels good. The Ryzen launch has been a bit of a mixed bag. The platform and processors have the potential to offer great value for money. It performs great, fantastic even, in any application. Yet we cannot look away from the fact that game performance in the enthusiast range remains somewhat limited. Enthusiast cards and multi-GPU combinations can run into a CPU bound situation at lower resolutions. These processors still offer plenty of performance if you game at 2560x1440 or higher, or stick to a mid-range graphics card. 

The Bad stuff

There is little of it. Performance of this board in the base / default configuration was a notch slower compared to others. I think that with the current beta BIOS we used (1.55) not all cores are binned to 3.7 GHz. This, however, is firmware stuff. Once we overclocked the Ryzen 7 1700 to 4100 MHz, it actually became the fastest motherboard of all of them. So that's easy to tweak out. 

What is going on with CPU bound game performance?

The theory right now is that there is a bandwidth challenge in-between the two CCXes (the Ryzen 7 processor has two CPU clusters each holding four cores and caches). These two CCXes communicate with each other over an interlink, and as is seems the bandwidth there is a limiting factor weirdly enough, just for CPU gaming. You can compensate, as that interlink is tied towards the frequency of the memory bus, thus faster memory helps. Ever since our first Ryzen review we already detected that Ryzen benefits from faster memory performance more than it should, well, that is the reason. So please get yourself at least 2667 MHz memory. It will not solve the problem itself, but will surely help in game performance. BTW ALL our tests with Ryzen 7 processors have been performed at 2667 or 3000 MHz.

The motherboard

At 310 euro the ASRock X370 motherboard is not cheap, but you can see where the money goes. It functions well and offers a wide feature set including dual M.2 slots (but just one at PCie Gen 3.0 x4). It has a 5 Gbps gigabit Ethernet jack as well as a Gigabit Intel Ethernet jack, it offers a very nice audio solution and thus comes with WIFI. As always, the first thing you'd want to do if you purchase a motherboard with such a new platform and infrastructure is to be sure that you flash the latest firmware to this motherboard. This is also the main reason why we delayed our X370 reviews a bit, we wanted to give the board partners a few weeks for the X370 platform to mature.

It is a motherboard with a proper feature-set and options when looking at USB3.1, the ten SATA ports, dual M.2, the looks and functionality. We have no doubt that with the new generation processors and chipsets there are bound to be a few motherboard firmware updates and fixes for smaller bugs. It comes with the territory. We quite honestly did not run into stuff that massively worried us. The motherboard used seems pretty well tuned, we had no stability issues and the UEFI BIOS is easy enough to work with. 

Power Consumption

If you choose the Ryzen 7 1700, with eight cores you're fine. With this processor now fabbed at 14 nm FinFET the TDP sticks at a low 65 Watts and with the system at idle I was a little shocked. With a GeForce GTX 1080 installed / 16 GB memory / SSD and the X370 motherboard I hovered at just under 50 Watts. That's just great and that is testimony to the 14nm fabrication as smaller packages can do with less voltage. When we stressed the processor with a Prime 1024M run we reached roughly 125 Watts, that's low enough for what it needs to be, but we do find it higher than expected. Overall though, this is impressive to see. When we game we hover at ~250 Watts, but obviously that factor is dependant on the type of graphics card you use of course. So yeah, these are really good values with a many core product. No complaints here whatsoever.

Some performance tips

If you'd like to boost your performance, especially for gaming, here are a few Guru3D tips:

1. Update your motherboard to the latest firmware BIOS.
2. Make sure you have your memory at at least 2667 MHz with CL16 - 2133 MHz will hurt game performance.
3. For best game performance, set your Windows energy performance mode to HIGH.
4. Tweak your processor, we reach 4.0 GHz on all cores on just air cooling - this is your biggest gain for game performance - but granted, this will eat more energy.

For the Ryzen 7 1700 we reach a stable 4.0 GHz on ALL cores on air and 4.1 with liquid cooling. The 100 MHz is not going to make all the difference though. After that number things will start to get complicated though. The Ryzen 7 1700 is easy to overclock, with this board however you must increase the voltage modes manually. Then select your multiplier or frequency of choice and you are good to go. 

The conclusion

I seem to really like the ASRock X370 Gaming Professional motherboard. This unit offers features that make the motherboard future-proof. You have 10 SATA3 ports, dual M.2 (albeit only one at full speed PCIe Gen 3.0 x4), WIFI and two Ethernet jacks. The magic, however, I feel is to be found in the fact that you are 5 Gbps ready with the Aquantia 5Gb/s LAN Ethernet jack. I love that. The jack is backwards compatible to your 10/100/1000 Gb/s LAN, and once you change your LAN infrastructure and once switches start to become available and affordable, you'll benefit from that greatly. All you need is some CAT7 cabling (it will likely even work on CAT5 and 6 as well) with the same compatible RJ45 jacks. I love that as you are reaching a ~600 MB/sec performance level at that jack. I cannot wait for NAS servers to follow! Once you have manually tweaked your processor, you will not look back though. You have seen the tweaking performance with the 329 USD Ryzen 7 1700, this processor is pure value and will offer you pretty much the same amount of performance as the 499 USD Ryzen 7 1800X once you tweak it. So it is very hard for me to recommend the 1700X and 1800X. That difference in money is much better spent on your motherboard and higher frequency memory. Ryzen 5 is coming in April, six and four core enabled processors with SMT at an even better price. This ASRock X370 Gaming Professional is also SLI and Crossfire compatible. If you go down that multi-GPU route, then the cards will configure themselves to x8 PCIe Gen 3.0 modus. That's plenty of bandwidth, but we would have liked to have seen more PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes on that Ryzen processor series, sure. The biggest problem for the ASRock X370 Gaming Professional is its price-tag, however if you compare it to the 300 euro MSI XPower Titanium then this board makes a lot more sense thanks to its exceptional feature-set. Next to all that it is also a lovely looking product which allows you to tweak your processor and memory easily enough. Once you have your tweak stabilized, your memory up and running, you will not look back. We had the 329 USD Ryzen 7 1700 processor running 100% stable at 4.1 GHz on all cores. If the €309 bothers you, hey, take a look at the ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Gaming K4 priced at €189. That motherboard looks virtually the same, yet has one Ethernet jack, no WIFI and a few less SATA3 ports. Other than that the difference is not that big. The Gaming Professional edition X370 is the premium enthusiast product, nothing less. Expensive? Yes, and yes, you will probably need a few firmware updates in the future. But it is one of the very few boards out there where I find the cost justified for what it offers in return regarding features. Nice job ASRock!

ATH +++

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