Final Words & Conclusion
Final words & conclusion
Historically the Gaming K6 models from ASRock sit in a 200 USD/ Euro price bracket. If ASRock can maintain that price level then you can purchase a motherboard that has a lot to offer. I'm not really happy about the Fatali1ty branding though, nobody in 2017 really has a feel with that gamer anymore, it's like purchasing a Porsche with a Vauxhal logo on it isn't it ? That branding aside, the motherboard itself ticks all the right boxes really. We do find it a little harder to tweak with ASRock motherboards opposed to others, still you'll get there. With the Gaming K6 we however ran into the issue that the G.Skill TridentZ 3866 MHz DDR4 XMP 2.0 profile would simply not work. So we do expect to see at least a BIOS upgrade or two. Other than that the board offers it all really. 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. The new Z270 chipset on its end is hardly different over the series Z270. 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. Here also we ran into minor bugs though, we could not properly set the RGB lighting to a static color or speedup/down the animations. Again, a BIOS update will likely fix this as we tested with early hardware and BIOSes to be totally honest.
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 noticed that XMP 2.0 would not work with the G.Skill TridentZ memory kit we have at hand.
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 always has been the price competitive fighter in the motherboard arena. Their motherboards might not have an expensive ThunderBolt or exclusive audio chip, nope they keep things in line with a proper budget in mind. Quality wise we have nothing to complain really, we spot solid proper components used and a lovely looking motherboard. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is managed by an ASMedia controller and not Intel thunderbolt, that choice right there shaves off 50 USD of your motherboard bill, while that ASMedia controller offers the very same 10 Gbit/s performance. Extra's you'll need to find as well, the AURA LED system (still a bit buggy when managed from the UEFI BIOS) looks very nice, you get two Intel Gigabit ethernet jacks and 2 extra SATA3 ports totaling towards eight connectors and then the two NVMe M2 enabled slots. We do however have to mention it again, we miss AC WIFI and also, why hasn't the industry moved to 10 GBit Ethernet jacks? ASRock offers a very nice and workable UEFI BIOS, everything can be tweaked (albeit a little harder than other brands) and controlled, oh and I just love my PUMP FAN header (most people these days have some sort of liquid cooling going on). Summed up I think that this would be a great 200 USD/Euro motherboard with terrific baseline performance, all the features you could possibly want and then a few extras. We like the looks as well, the black PCB with red printed coating does give the motherboards something extra, especially in combination with the new RGB LED systems. Highly recommended.
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