They are Z170-ready, affordable and good enough

Aug 6, 2015 09:02 GMT  ·  By

A day after the long awaited "Skylake" chip from Intel made its debut in Cologne during this year's Gamescom event, ASRock decided to launch its own Z170 motherboards to run with the new cutting-edge Skylake CPU.

In this regard, ASRock brings to the market three new series of motherboards dedicated to gaming performance, overclocking enthusiasts, and regular users. These are the Extreme Series, ASRock Gaming Series, and OC Formula Series.

The first series of the new ASRock offer, the Extreme Series, brings a new generation of high-performance casual consumer-oriented motherboards, built for designers and creatives, with the Z170 Extreme7+ model leading the pack.

The Extreme series come with a standard four PCIe Gen3.0 x16 slots that support both high-performance consumer grade graphics cards and professional graphics cards like AMD FirePro and Nvidia Quadro.

Along with three SATA Express ports, the Express series units also come with the much-coveted Ultra M.2 slots that will support the latest high-performance SSDs from Intel and other manufacturers, together with ASRock’s U.2 Kit. In addition, a large PCIe SSD RAID array is also available.

Z170 Extreme7+
Z170 Extreme7+

ASRock brings affordability and good enough design

Next in line in ASRock's offer is the gaming-dedicated ASRock Gaming Series, with its most potent model being the Z170 Gaming K6+. Besides having PCIe 3.0 x16 slots for building CrossFireX or SLI configurations, the top-tier mainboard also has a good onboard solution called Purity Sound 3. In addition to that, it has the world's first front USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C  panel that is delivered free to all high-end ASRock mainboards that have a "+" in their name.

The last and most potent of the three series coming from ASRock is the Z170 OC Formula, built for and dedicated to overclocking enthusiasts that find no greater pleasure than pouring liquid nitrogen on their melting, extremely-expensive CPUs.

Holding slots for four DDR4 DIMM modules that can go to over 4000MHz and coming with the same connectivity interfaces like the previous series, four PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, three additional Utra M.2 slots and seven PCIe RAID arrays, the ASRock OC Formula Series is a true beast in its own right.

However, there are no details on whether the Extreme Series and Gaming Series will come with DDR4 slots. While the OC-oriented mainboard can provide good enough overclocking ability, it does not push the hardware limits as other manufacturers do when assigning extra socket pins for the CPU in case of absolutely extreme overclocking operations.

ASRock's new series are a welcomed addition to a growing offer of Z170-based mainboards that will turn "de rigueur" in very short time.

Z170 OC Formula
Z170 OC Formula
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ASRock 100 Series Motherboards (4 Images)

ASRock holds a high Z170 chipset standard
Z170 Extreme7+Z170 Gaming K6+
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