Asrock fatal1ty x370 professional gaming review (full review)

ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming technical features

Unboxing and design

The ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming It is presented in a box that perfectly represents the Fatal1ty series, we see some letters with the name of the product and its " Super Alloy " technology.

Also highlighted are its most important features such as compatibility with Ryzen processors, the possibility of mounting SLI and CrossFire configurations and its Gigabit network.

We open the box and we find two sections as usual in all high-end boards, the first houses the motherboard and the second all its accessories. The bundle includes:

ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming motherboardBackplate.Instruction manual and quick guide.Disk CD with drivers.SATA Cable Sets.Screw to connect M.2 disk.

The ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming is manufactured with a PCB that follows the Fatal1ty series color scheme, black and red in a very similar combination to the one seen on the box as we mentioned before. The board is built with an ATX form factor and reaches dimensions of 30.5 cm x 24.4 cm so there is no surprise in this regard.

Rear view of the motherboard.

Asrock has included a large heatsink to cool the chipset and the VRM system of this motherboard, the heatsink includes red LED lighting and it will come with pearls to keep cool the 16 "Super Alloy" phases that are capable of offering up to 60A of power electric so it will cover the demands of the most demanding overclockers.

The benefits of Super Alloy technology continue with great components like power phases, Nichicon 12K Platinum capacitors and a reinforced PCB.

It has available 4 DDR4 RAM memory sockets compatible with up to 64 GB with speed from 2133 MHz to 3200 MHz with overclocking. The memories will work in dual chanel configuration so that we can get all the performance of the advanced AMD Ryzen processors and their Zen microarchitecture.

The ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming offers us two PCIe 3.0 to x16 sockets so we will not have problems to configure a CrossFire or SLI system with two graphics cards, with this we will obtain the best possible performance in new generation video games. It also has a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot with x4 electrical operation and 2 PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots.

As expected we have an M.2 connection on top of the first x16 slot to install any disk of this interface with its 32 GB / s bandwidth. Compatible models are 2242/2260/2280/22110 with x4 / x2 and x1 speed.

It also incorporates a second M.2 connection to make a RAID 0.1.5 with NVMe disks. Wow!

On top of classic connections, it includes a whopping 10 SATA III 6 GB / s ports so we can connect a large number of hard drives and enjoy a large storage capacity.

We continue with a top quality HD 7.1 sound system compatible with Creative Sound Blaster Cinema 3 and which is made up of the Realtek ALC1220 codec. This sound system includes Nichicon capacitors, a TI NE5532 amplifier of 120dB for top range headphones of 600 Ohm and of course it has a separate section of the PCB to avoid interference. Its connectors are gold plated to improve contact and includes RGB LED lighting.

ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming includes wireless connectivity in the form of WiFI 802.11ac with a maximum speed of 433 Mbps and Bluetooth 4.2 technology so that we can use a large number of accessories and peripherals without the annoying cables.

Once we look at the lower right area we have a control panel, several connectors for fans, internal USB connections and a DEBUG Led that will tell us about any type of incident.

The rear connections come to meet the needs of most users. It has:

2 Antenna Ports 1 PS / 21 Keyboard / Mouse Port Optical SPDIF Out Port 1 USB 3.1 Type A1 x USB 3.1 Type-C Port 6 USB 3.0 Ports 2 RJ-45 LAN Ports with LEDs (ACT / LINK LED and SPEED LED) 1 Switch Transparent CMOS HD Audio Connectors: Rear Speaker / Center / Bass / Line In / Front Speaker / Microphone (3.5mm gold plated jacks)

It is curious that ASRock is the first manufacturer to mount a 5 Gigabit network card (100/1000/2500/5000 Mb / s) signed by an AQUANTIA AQC108 chip. Today there are no routers that take advantage of it, but it is always good to have such a connection for years to come.

Test bench and tests

TESTING BENCH
Processor:	AMD Ryzen 5 1600
Base plate:	ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming
Memory:	Corsair Dominator Platinum SE Torque
Heatsink	Corsair H100i V2.
HDD	Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB.
Graphic card	Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti.
Power supply	Corsair AX860i.

To check the stability of the AMD Ryzen 5 1600 processor and motherboard we have stressed with Prime 95 Custom and air cooling. The graphics we have used is an Nvidia GTX 1080, without further delay, let's see the results obtained in our tests with a 1920 x 1080 monitor.

BIOS

We had not tested an ASRock motherboard for a long time and of course, the evolution is more than evident. What we demanded years ago, has already been rectified: fluidity and periodic updates are already a fact.

We have been very attentive in this release of AM4 and ASRock along with ASUS have been the ones that have released the most BETA phase BIOS updates, the one that has responded the best to their community and is taking it very seriously

The BIOS allows us to make endless modifications in the face of overclocking, but to be honest, we have not touched it in that aspect because although they are putting the batteries, we use the AMD Ryzen Master application to carry out a correct overclock. It also allows us to customize the speed of the fans, monitor temperatures, update the BIOS online (this was done previously since the Sandy Bridge generation) and activate / deactivate connections. In other words, a very, very stable and complete BIOS. Good job!

Final words and conclusion about ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming

The ASRock Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming It is one of the best motherboards that the market currently offers us. Build quality, 16 power phases, 10 SATA connections, dual M.2 NVMe connection, quality sound and a super full BIOS.

In our tests we have used the new AMD Ryzen 5 1600 at a frequency of 4 GHz. The results have been really good, and the memories have been able to set them at high speed. It can be seen that ASRock is taking the AM4 platform very seriously and has been one of the manufacturers with the most variety of motherboards in its launch, although in Spain some stores only have it listed.

It is also important to note that it includes dual-band 802.11 AC Wifi, Bluetooth 4.2 connection and two internal network connections. One of them is 5 gigabit being the motherboards with this new connection. Although there are no routers that take out, at the moment, so much performance.

We recommend reading the best motherboards on the market

The only negative aspect, if it can be considered, is that its price is somewhat high (about 300 euros). For the rest congratulate ASRock, great job guys.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ ATTRACTIVE DESIGN AND QUALITY COMPONENTS.	- SOMETHING HIGH PRICE FOR SOME USERS, BUT IT IS THE BEST AND IT IS JUSTIFIED.
+ POSSIBILITY OF SLI AND EFFICIENCY IN REFRIGERATION.
+ NETWORK CARD 5 GIGABIT.
+ BIOS UPDATES AND SYSTEM STABILITY.
+ OVERCLOCKING CAPABILITY.