ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Series Gen 3 Review

The ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 uses a very attractive UEFI bios with full mouse control. It is well laid out, professionally presented and over the course of the last week we found it to be extremely stable and able to recover without problem from over zealous settings.

We really did warm to the bios immediately, as the layout is extremely intuitive and there are a plethora of settings for overclocking and voltage control.

Overclocking the board was as painless as we have experienced, reaching 4.6ghz via the built in settings, without any manual intervention. If you fine tune voltages and other settings they can be stored for later retrieval.

We normally use the Noctua NH D14 cooler for these reviews, but we wanted to try something different, and decided to use the new Intel cooler (XTS-100H), which is actually a fairly effective cooler, and doesn't require any special or complex backplate bracket fitting.

We also decided to use some of the highest performance ADATA memory which is rated to 2200mhz with 9-9-9-24 1T timings. Pictured above are two XFX HD6870 Black Edition video cards.

We managed to get the board running at 4.8ghz with some increased voltage settings, but the Intel cooler was running a little hot for our tastes, so we backed down to 4.6ghz which required more realistic 24/7 settings. 4.6ghz is easily achievable by the mass populace who don't have a hard core cooler.

The ASRock Fatal1ty board immediately detected the memory and set the timings correctly to 2133mhz. This didn't require any user intervention. Achieving a total stable 4.6ghz was utterly painless and ideal for a user who really doesn't feel that comfortable playing with bios settings.

Validation is available over here.

Become a Patron!