HWM Singapore — May 2017

ASROCK Z270 SUPERCARRIER

ASRock’s Supercarrier motherboard is

perhaps a too-literal interpretation of the

term “ȵ agship”, but we mean that in a

good way. It is packed with nearly every

imaginable feature and then some, but it

does so at a very competitive price that will

give its rivals a serious run for their money.

For starters, it comes with a ton of

storage and connectivity options, including

10 SATA 6Gbps ports (although only six

are provided natively through the chipset),

three M.2 sockets, and Wi-Fi connectivity.

There are no U.2 ports, but there aren’t

many drives that use them anyway, and

you can add some via M.2 adapter cards if

you really need the interface.

ASRock has even thrown in not one, but

two Thunderbolt 3 ports, so you’ll be able

to take advantage of the latest devices that

support the standard. b

In addition, it has four metal-reinforced

PCIe 3.0 x16 slots and support for up to

4-way SLI/Crossȴ re, courtesy of a PLX PEX

8747 PCIe lane switcher.

This is a feature usually found on more

premium motherboards, and the Gigabyte

Aorus Z270X Gaming 9 is the only other

board here to have it, and it costs a good

$200 more.

That said, we can’t help but wonder if

this is an unnecessary feature that just

serves to drive costs up. Users gunning

for the Z270 platform probably won’t be

looking at 4-way setups, and NVIDIA has

even limited SLI to just two cards on its

Pascal GPUs.

Another standout feature is the use

of the Aquantia AQC108 5Gbps network

controller which supports up to ȴ ve

times the throughput of regular Ethernet

ports. On top of that, you get dual Gigabit

Ethernet ports that support teaming,

so this is one of the most fully-featured

boards when it comes to network

connectivity.

To appeal to overclockers, it is

equipped with a 14-phase power design

and dual BIOS to easily recover from

failed overclocks. And of course, there’s

the onboard RGB lighting, which takes

the form of three discrete zones and a

dedicated RGB lighting strip header that

will allow you to add a dash of pizzazz to

your build.

AT A GLANCE

POWER PHASES

14-phase

PCIE SLOTS

4x PCIe 3.0 x16; 1x

PCIe3.0 x1

STORAGE

10x SATA 6Gbps; 2x

SATAExpress; 3x M.2

PRICE

$639

All the PCIe slots have been

reinforced with metal for extra

support.

8)78

You’ll ȴ nd one of the widest

selections of storage connectivity

options here.

A wide range

of storage and

connecঞ vity

opঞ ons.

Performance lags

slightly behind

compeঞ tors.

68 +:0 | MAY 2017