NoxTek
The Geek Redneck
- Joined
- May 27, 2002
- Messages
- 9,300
This is mostly just a random rant....
Do you ever get a board and just feel like it hates you and you're going to hate it - almost right from the first time you power it up?
I have had this Asrock Z370M Pro4 up and running for barely over a day, and I absolutely loathe it already.
(For the record, I like Asrock. I've had several decent Asrock boards in the past - especially for what they cost. My HTPC is rocking an Asrock H97 "Anniversary" board with a Pentium G3258 on an early BIOS that lets you overclock the HELL out of it. I love that board!)
I know it's a 'value' board on the low end of the spectrum and I for sure wasn't expecting miracles. I was impressed by the 5 out of 5 user score on Newegg and the fact that such a low priced board had TWO m.2 slots and moderate overclocking features. For only $130? Heck yeah! So I bit. Saved me a bit of cash especially with a combo deal with an 8700k on Newegg. I wish I had listened to my gut and spent more for a Gigabyte or Asus board.
The BIOS is laid out fairly well, especially if you choose 'Advanced View' (like most of us would). Typical Award UEFI layout that has some flair common to most current UEFIs but it's still laid out fairly logical. But the overclocking options just don't seem to do what you would expect them to. I can lock the multipliers on all cores in the UEFI, disable Speedstep and all of the usual jazz, and it will still ignore all of that in Windows. Maybe you'll get 42x (which is I think the lowest base turbo multiplier on the cores by default from Intel), maybe you'll get 47x, maybe you'll get really unlucky and get 37x (the base non turbo multiplier). It's like the overclocking options in the BIOS are merely a suggestion.
vCore? Well, you can set vCore in the UEFI (Fixed or Offset) but good luck getting an actual core reading with any Windows tool. Apparently the Z370M Pro4 is so new, and uses such a new / odd sensor setup that none of the usual utilities are setup to read vCore. CPU-Z? It defaults to showing VID where vCore would normally be. HWInfo64 doesn't pull a vCore reading where you'd normally expect to see it (Under the motherboard in the sensor data). About the closest you can get is Asrock's EXTREMELY primitive "A-tune" software and even that doesn't seem to jive very well with what you've set in the UEFI. Seriously - I've never been a fan of software overclocking utilities, but A-Tune is pretty abysmal.
Aside from the above the thing is generally stable. Games run great, everything is peachy on the stability front. Maybe I just expected way too much.
I have never had a board feel like it was 'fighting' me the entire time like this one. We get along like oil and water. I finally just decided to buy the Asus ROG Strix ITX board that [H] and Dan recently reviewed and gave high marks to. It costs almost twice as much, but I guess you get what you pay for. This Asrock is going up on the FS/T board.
About the only good thing I can say about it is those two m.2 slots work really nicely. BOTH support PCIE NVME which is cool - I know some boards that have two slots only support SATA on one slot or whatever. Setting up a RAID0 with dual m.2 drives was dead simple, and port remapping the m.2 slots for Intel's RST works great.
Do you ever get a board and just feel like it hates you and you're going to hate it - almost right from the first time you power it up?
I have had this Asrock Z370M Pro4 up and running for barely over a day, and I absolutely loathe it already.
(For the record, I like Asrock. I've had several decent Asrock boards in the past - especially for what they cost. My HTPC is rocking an Asrock H97 "Anniversary" board with a Pentium G3258 on an early BIOS that lets you overclock the HELL out of it. I love that board!)
I know it's a 'value' board on the low end of the spectrum and I for sure wasn't expecting miracles. I was impressed by the 5 out of 5 user score on Newegg and the fact that such a low priced board had TWO m.2 slots and moderate overclocking features. For only $130? Heck yeah! So I bit. Saved me a bit of cash especially with a combo deal with an 8700k on Newegg. I wish I had listened to my gut and spent more for a Gigabyte or Asus board.
The BIOS is laid out fairly well, especially if you choose 'Advanced View' (like most of us would). Typical Award UEFI layout that has some flair common to most current UEFIs but it's still laid out fairly logical. But the overclocking options just don't seem to do what you would expect them to. I can lock the multipliers on all cores in the UEFI, disable Speedstep and all of the usual jazz, and it will still ignore all of that in Windows. Maybe you'll get 42x (which is I think the lowest base turbo multiplier on the cores by default from Intel), maybe you'll get 47x, maybe you'll get really unlucky and get 37x (the base non turbo multiplier). It's like the overclocking options in the BIOS are merely a suggestion.
vCore? Well, you can set vCore in the UEFI (Fixed or Offset) but good luck getting an actual core reading with any Windows tool. Apparently the Z370M Pro4 is so new, and uses such a new / odd sensor setup that none of the usual utilities are setup to read vCore. CPU-Z? It defaults to showing VID where vCore would normally be. HWInfo64 doesn't pull a vCore reading where you'd normally expect to see it (Under the motherboard in the sensor data). About the closest you can get is Asrock's EXTREMELY primitive "A-tune" software and even that doesn't seem to jive very well with what you've set in the UEFI. Seriously - I've never been a fan of software overclocking utilities, but A-Tune is pretty abysmal.
Aside from the above the thing is generally stable. Games run great, everything is peachy on the stability front. Maybe I just expected way too much.
I have never had a board feel like it was 'fighting' me the entire time like this one. We get along like oil and water. I finally just decided to buy the Asus ROG Strix ITX board that [H] and Dan recently reviewed and gave high marks to. It costs almost twice as much, but I guess you get what you pay for. This Asrock is going up on the FS/T board.
About the only good thing I can say about it is those two m.2 slots work really nicely. BOTH support PCIE NVME which is cool - I know some boards that have two slots only support SATA on one slot or whatever. Setting up a RAID0 with dual m.2 drives was dead simple, and port remapping the m.2 slots for Intel's RST works great.
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