ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Series Gen 3 Review

The ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Series Gen 3 is one of the best motherboards we have tested this year. Easily accessible overclocking is brought to the masses, thanks to a totally intuitive user interface which makes the task extremely straightforward.

Overclocking has been seen as a dark art for many years, but to achieve 4.6ghz from this board we simply installed the processor and a relatively ‘entry' level Intel cooler and changed a few settings in the bios. It really is that easy. More experienced users will be able to push the 2600k to 5.0ghz+ with hardcore cooling.

The board design is fantastic, with high grade capacitors used throughout for added stability and overclocking capabilities. The PCB colour scheme is effective and will look great when included in a windowed, custom system build. We would have liked to see a few more fan headers included on the board however, but it seems a minor point when the rest of the product is so well designed and carefully thought out. The inclusion of a reset CMOS button on the I/O panel earns bonus points.

When the system is pushed to the limits, it recovers well, and only once did we have to use the reset button on the I/O panel to get it posting again with default settings.

Graphics performance is first class, and with future proofing for PCI Express 3.0 (Gen 3) there will be considerable life left in this product, even when the next generation of Intel processors are released.

I was particularly impressed with the memory support. We used three sets of memory from Crucial, Corsair and ADATA, and they were all detected without manual intervention. This may seem like a small point, but we often find that bios settings can need tweaked for higher speed memory. Our ADATA performance gaming memory was detected at 2133mhz with tight timings immediately.

The price point for such an exclusive, high end product is also reasonable, weighing in at £199 inc vat.

Pros:

• Fantastic build quality.
• Overclocks well.
• Connectivity is class leading.
• Stable power delivery.
• Future proofing for the next generation.
• Bios is very intuitive, especially for less experienced enthusiast users.

Cons:

• A few more fan headers would have been nice.

Kitguru says: ASRock are quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with

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