ASRock Z270 Extreme 4 Review - A Motherboard Tested

ASRock Z270 EXTREME 4
Good Value For New Kaby Lake Platform 

In this review we'll discuss the ASRock Z270 EXTREME 4 in a wide variety of benchmarks and situations with an Core i5 7600K processor. That puppy is developed on the 14 nm node the Core i5 series processors are intended to be the more budget friendly offering from Intel, for a more mainstream consumer. For this review we look at the performance of this processor and motherboard in a wide variety of benchmarks and situations. The ASRock Z270 EXTREME 4 thus is a Kaby lake ready motherboard with proper looks and an AURA RGB LED system that can be controlled from the EUFI BIOS. Other then that you are looking at your normal high-end Intel chipset based motherboard, with a few hidden easter-eggs of course.

Kaby Lake processors for the desktop platform have been released. Though you'd think it is an all new chip, however it is merely a respin seen from Skylake, meaning both series processors are Socket 1151. This also means that IF you are in the market for a new series 7000 processor, your H170 or Z170 motherboard can be compatible with Kaby Lake after a motherboard BIOS upgrade. The new series Kaby Lake processors are fairly energy efficient, still as powerful as they have been for years. If you are interested in new technologies like Intel Optane, you will however need to upgrade to a Z270 and H270 range motherboard. This new Z270 platform offers supports for Optane SSDs and offers supports for slightly faster DDR4 memory.
  

 
As you are going to find out, EXTREME 4 an aesthetically pleasing platform fitted with the latest that technology can house like up-to 3,866+ MHZ XMP DDR4 memory, the fastest NVMe PCIe and M.2. storage unit support and some really nice looks.  The EXTREME 4 comes with two M.2. slot. The steel armored PCIe slots pop out, and ASRock improved on the Realtek 1220 audio codec by using Nichicon capacitors for this 7.1 channel audio ready setup.

 
Yes of course this motherboard takes part in the RGB hype that has found its way into pretty much any PC component that you can plug into something. ASrock did it clever though, no nagging forced to load up software in windows no you can control it from the BIOS. Obviously there is a lot more going on, what we like for example is that this motherboard offers a proper Intel Gigabit Ethernet jack. Armed with that Z270 chipset this motherboard offers three x16 slots: 1x PCIe 3.0 x16 and three 3.0 x1. But yeah. The EXtreme 4 series historically did cost just 150 to 200 EURO/USD, making these board the more "value" ones. Let's get started with the actual review shall we?