The ASRock Fatal1ty Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac Motherboard Review
by E. Fylladitakis on September 19, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- ASRock
- Mini ITX
- Z270
- 7700K
- Z270 Gaming ITX/ac
The ASRock Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac Review
CPU Performance
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
As it can be summarized by all of the following graphs, the ASRock Z270 Gaming ITX/ac falls victim to its own default BIOS settings, as it is the only motherboard that does not have MCT enabled by default. As such, it always falls shortly behind all other Z270 motherboards, especially in multi-threaded performance tests.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v1.0.2: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container: a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short. We also take the third video and transcode it to HEVC. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2017. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test v2.1: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here. We are using the latest version of 3DPM, which has a significant number of tweaks over the original version to avoid issues with cache management and speeding up some of the algorithms.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
41 Comments
View All Comments
jjj - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
6 months after launch and AT is yet to review a single Ryzen mobo.nathanddrews - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
You should buy some and send them to AT.sonny73n - Wednesday, September 20, 2017 - link
"You should buy some and send them to AT."Without AT's permission or agreement to do a review? Or are you just being a foul mouth?
Oxford Guy - Monday, September 25, 2017 - link
How about buying Asrock one of its 170 boards so it can fix the BIOS for it with the code Intel gave them in April.But, hey — who needs to worry about random crash bugs from a hyperthreading flaw?
Gavin Bonshor - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
You can expect a wave of them coming very soon :)Ian Cutress - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
We've had zero dedicated motherboard reviewers at AT for most of the year, as I'm spending all my time on CPU testing (or perhaps you'd want me to forgo the CPU tests?). I've been building a team in the interim to take care of MB review duties. Should be in full swing from about this point on.jjj - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
Interesting attitude and misleading statement.You had 4 mobo reviews after the Ryzen launch , staff or no staff and it's statistically significant that none is for a Ryzen mobo. If you add context like interest in the product, value offered, it becomes more than odd.
What's the cause, that's for you to figure out and adjust but that seems unlikely given your attitude. - "or perhaps you'd want me to forgo the CPU tests?)"
In the end, you lose money by not serving the market.
DanNeely - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
All by a single reviewer - who also does all the case, PSU, and keyboard reviews too and thus has limited free time available - and on a single platform. The latter is because as a distributed team Anandtech doesn't have a single office to store all their stuff. Each reviewer needs his/her own set of parts to test with; and for consistency the same parts (particularly the CPU for OCing) need to be the same for everything done on the platform. To avoid spending large amounts on shipping and customs fees that means any part time mobo reviewers are probably only going to have a single platform. E. Fylladitakis is doing Z270. One or more of the newbies is working on Ryzen.There was a tweet a few days ago (don't recall if from Ian or Ryan) about having gotten 5 submissions from the new mobo reviewers that need edited. Since we haven't seen anything except the x399 overview article on the subject from a newish Author (Joe Shields started in July) they're presumably all still being revised to site standards. I'd imagine at least some of the Ryzen mobo reviews you're looking for are coming soon.
Gothmoth - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
since anand is gone it´s spiraling down the drainrealistz - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
Forum is a mess too. It's run by pro-AMD mods.