Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
I think ASRock hit the nail here in terms of value for money. IF they keep the price in that 150~200 USD range then you'll get a very stylish motherboard as it has proper looks and really all you need to get up and running and then some. You know I've stated in my Kaby Lake review already that Intel really isn't delivering anymore. It's the same quad-core processor series released year after year in nearly the same performance bracket. Kaby Lake is once again a quad-core processor with minor tweaks, slightly higher turbos and a processor that can tweak to the 5 GHz domain. All in all not bad but let's face it - clock for clock these processors all roughly perform the same starting at Sandy-Bridge and the Core i5 2500 / Core i7 2600 series released in January 2011 (!). It's the clock frequencies where you can find the extra performance, not the architecture, but even then... it's all very relative. The new 200 chipset on its end is hardly different over the series 100 either. If you pick the Z270 series you will gain a few PCI-Express lanes and the ability to connect Intel Optane, which 0.00001% of you will buy. That's pretty much it :/
If you have upgraded in the last year or two to a new PC, well, the upgrade remains a hard sell. This motherboard however does have aesthetic improvements as well as your platform will be upgraded towards full compatibility with USB 3.1 (10 Gbps) as well as two M.2 slots and sure, a bit of LED bling, we do like the Aura RGB system being able to control it from the BIOS. It however is a bit confusing as ASUS also calls they RGB control platform AURA :)
Performance & Tweaking
The overall performance for this motherboard with a Core i5 I'd rate as "good" for the results as tested with a Core i5 7600K. Temps remain very acceptable (depending on choice of cooling) and temperatures when the CPU is overclocked with added voltage definitely seem to be a notch better opposed to Haswell and Skylake. We have been able to reach 5.0 GHz stable enough on liquid cooling. At that level you are looking at up-to 1.35V needed on that CPU core. We did find that getting to 5.00 Ghz was harder then on other motherboards. We noticed that XMP would not work with the G.Skill memory as well.
Power Consumption
If we step back and take the Intel reference board with a Sandy Bridge processor (2600K) without a dedicated graphics card, that platform idled at roughly 50 Watts. Once we stress the processor 100% on that platform we'd see ~120 Watts power consumption. With Kaby Lake (7600K) we noticed roughly 45 Watts in idle and 100 Watts with processor load at 100%. Things again remain relative.
The Bottom Line
ASrock did this one right as things are fairly uncomplicated, you get whatever you need anno 2017 features wise with plenty of USB, display, M2 and storage connectors. There's no expensive Thunderbolt chip in there or an expensive Creative labs audio codec, and that's all fine really as that makes the pricing more in line to what you guys want. My main worry remains to be that Kaby Lake processors simply might not offer enough of a difference of last-gen generation processors. it remains more of the same really, and the tiny bump in perf, is easily tweaked out of these processors. But that fact has nothing to do with the infrastructure underneath it all, the Z270 motherboard as tested today. You'll receive a motherboard with an okay, well definitely nice enough audio solution and accompanying software suite. Love or hate the LED bling, you are going to get it in such a manner that you can disable it as well with the AURA control in the BIOS. We do however sorely miss AC WIFI and hey again... why hasn't the industry moved to 10 GBit Ethernet jacks anno 2016 just yet? These two lacking features are a bit of a missed opportunity IMHO. The motherboard otherwise is stable thanks to a really quality build with proper components used, it is mature and comes with a very nice UEFI BIOS as well. I so love my PUMP FAN header (most people these days have some sort of liquid cooling going on). In closing, when you think your system is outdated and you would like to benefit from features such as USB 3.1, proper fast SATA3 ports, nice audio and some LEDs, hey - that's where Kaby Lake with a Z270 motherboard can make sense. Realistically, if you have upgraded of the past year or 2-3 already, you might want to sit and wait for an actual generational improvement or perhaps something from the competition (AMD) that is launching some good stuff in Q1 2017. One negative is that the 3,867 MHz XMP 2.0 memory from G.Skill did not kick in, we tested eight Z270 board thus far (at the time of writing) and ASRock is the first to run into this. It is nothing that will not be fixed with a BIOS update though. Overclocking as well can be a little more complicated in the ASROCK UEFI BIOS as compared to others. Minor stuff though, The ASRock Z270 Extreme 4 we can recommended, it looks terrific has a wide expansive feature-set and performs well. Though the pricing is unconfirmed at the time of writing we do expect it to sit in the 150 to 200 USD range, and if that is the case then it might be a proper value motherboard with lots of features. Very nice.
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