ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 Motherboard Review
Overview
Today at pcG we are going to take a look at one of the new Z170 Skylake motherboards, this is the third one we have looked at so far and also the second one from ASRock, this is the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6
NOTE (1): The Intel H170 Express Chipset supports 6th Gen Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors, and Intel Pentium and Celeron processors for Socket LGA1151. The new Socket 1151 is not backward compatible with previous Intel Core CPUs and, at the time of writing only Skylake processors are compatible with these motherboards. Also another big change for Skylake is the fact that there’s no support for DDR3. DDR4 is now king, although there’s only support for Dual Channel memory and not Quad Channel; for that you’ll need to look at Intel’s X99 platform. The bottom line here is that a new Skylake based Gaming Rig’s going to comprise of a new Motherboard, CPU and RAM.
NOTE (2): Due to the XHCI Driver not being incorporated into Windows 7, USB devices will not function on 100 Series motherboards when trying to install Windows 7. Windows 8.1 and above will work just fine. Further information can be found here.
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‘Extra large aluminum alloy heat sinks that effectively take away heat from the MOSFET and chipset so that your whole system may perform more stable. Compared to traditional chokes, ASRock’s premium 60A power chokes effectively make the saturation current up to three times better, thus providing enhanced and improved Vcore voltage to the motherboard. A combination of 820uF and 100uF capacitors. Together these capacitors provide clearer, efficient and more responsive CPU Vcore power, and overclockers may achieve higher scores.’ |
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The ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 arrived at pcG in a large mainly black cardboard box, the most striking image on the front of the box is the new Praying Mantis logo which is very imposing if I am honest (ED: scaredy cat!). The Fatal1ty logo is on the front of the box twice (yes, not once, but twice) in the top right hand corner and bottom right hand corner above the product name. We can also tell from the small logos running along the bottom of the box that the K6 supports the following: Intel Z170 Chipset, support for Intel Core processors, AMD CrossFire support, Nvidia SLI Ready, Killer Ethernet (E2400), HDMI output, DTS Connect and support for Windows 10.
On inspection of the back of the box we find a wealth of information pertaining to the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6. There is a large view of the motherboard with various features highlighted all around it; 12 Power Phase Design, XXL – Aluminium Alloy Heatsink, Nichicon 12K Platinum Caps, I/O Armor, Digi Power and Supports DDR4 3600+ (OC). Over on the left hand side we see further highlights such as Fatal1ty Mouse Port, Killer LAN, x2 USB 3.1 (type A and type C) connectors on the rear I/O and Purity Sound 3. In the far right hand corner we see that the K6 has Key Master and a Ultra M.2 (32Gb/s) slot. Also, there is a basic specification table (see Specifications/Features below).
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When we open the box we are presented with the Quick Installation Guide, Software Setup Guide and a handful of accessories (see below). Once we lift the cardboard tray we are greeted by the sight of the motherboard itself which sits snugly in a basic foam mat which in turn is in a antistatic bag.
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ACCESSORIES
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There’s not too much in the box but we have the essentials; meaning a user guide, an I/O shield and some SATA cables…
At the time of writing this review, the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 is retailing on Amazon
Specifications/Features
courtesy of ASRock
- ASRock Super Alloy
- Gaming Armor – CPU Power / Memory / VGA Card / Cooling / Internet / Audio
- Supports 6th Generation Intel® Core™ Processors (Socket 1151)
- Digi Power, 12 Power Phase Design
- Supports DDR4 3866+(OC) memory modules
- 2 PCIe 3.0 x16, 3 PCIe 3.0 x1
- NVIDIA® Quad SLI™, AMD 3-Way CrossFireX™
- Graphics Output Options: DVI-D, HDMI, DisplayPort 1.2
- Supports Triple Monitor
- 7.1 CH HD Audio (Realtek ALC1150 Audio Codec), Supports Purity Sound™ 3 & DTS Connect
- 2 SATA Express, 8 SATA3, 1 Ultra M.2 (PCIe Gen3 x4 & SATA3)
- 2 USB 3.1 10Gb/s (1 Type-A + 1 Type-C), 8 USB 3.0 (2 Front, 5 Rear, 1 Fatal1ty Mouse Port)
- Supports Full Spike Protection, ASRock Live Update & APP Shop, F-Stream, Key Master, XSplit
* Additional details available here
First Impressions
My first impressions of the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 is that it looks the business, very rarely would I use slang like that but the black Gaming armor and that Silver Praying Mantis logo, I mean… come on! 🙂 I have been using the Fatal1ty Z97X Killer for nearly a year now and I am glad to see that ASRock have spiced things up in the looks department. I mentioned earlier that the K6 is Approximately £27.00 more than the K4, the aesthetics alone almost make this extra money worthwhile!
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Looking at the right side of the board and working left to right; we can see that we have the BIOS selection switch that allows you to switch between the two BIOS’s aboard the Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6, two BIOS chips (more on those later) and ten horizontal SATA ports (x8 SATA 6B/s & x2 eSATA). Behind them we have what is commonly known as the South Bridge with its cool looking aluminium heatsink and raised Praying Mantis logo, to the right of this we have the vertical mounted USB 3.0 port followed by the first of four chassis fan headers (CHA_FAN3), thankfully all headers are 4-pin and PWM controlled. Next we find the main 24-pin power socket and apart from a few components we have nothing until we get to the far right corner where we find the Power/Reset buttons and two more chassis fan headers (CHA_FAN1 & CHA_FAN4). Dominating the right side of the board we also have the four DDR4 DIMM sockets supports up to 3600MHz+ (OC) Memory (RAM).
Looking at the opposite side of the board (the left) and again working left to right, we find the main motherboard IO panel (more about this later), notice the I/O shroud that covers this area which is in keeping with the design of the rest of the board. Most of this side is taken up by the on-board soundcard, this 7.1 CH HD Audio setup is powered by a Realtek ALC1150 Audio Codec and supports Purity Sound™ 3 & DTS Connect. Even though this area has been accused of looking a bit cheap I still think it is better than nothing, illumination would have been nice of course!
Looking at the PCIe 3.0 lanes we can see that there are six slots and these are wired up in the following way; the first slot is a x1 slot, this is then followed (left to right) by a x16 (16 lane) slot (red), a gap, another x1 slot, a second x16 (8 lane) slot (red), another x1 slot and finally a third x16 (4 lane) slot (red). As you can see this board supports both SLI and Crosfire technologies which is always nice to see…
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The top of the board is dominated by the CPU Power phase heatsinks and the LGA1151 Socket. The CPU 8-pin socket is here in its normal position. Notice the design of the heatsink and how in tune it is with the shape of the I/O shroud, very sleek!
Looking at the bottom of the board and again working from left to right, we have an HD Audio header in the left corner, followed by a serial port and then a TPM header. Next to this we have the Thunderbolt A/C connector, x2 USB 2.0 headers, Debug LED, the remaining chassis fan header (CHA_FAN2) and finally the main front panel header.
Turning the board over gives us a good view of the matte black PCB, well, it would have been a good view if it had been cleaned properly. The whole back was very smeary from some sort of cleaning agent, this detracted from what would have been a very sleek looking finish. Note that the main heatsinks have been screwed on and not just stuck on, this gives the whole motherboard more security when handling it, that’s if you use heatsinks as handles like some people (yes you!) do. 🙂
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In the top right hand corner we find the Reset/Start buttons, it would have been nice for them to have been illuminated and to be quite honest the style of them seems to say that they would, but alas no. Below them, towards the middle of the right side we find the ten horizontal SATA ports (x8 SATA 6B/s & x2 eSATA), thankfully they have been moved back together and placed in the normal position unlike the ones on the more budget conscious K4.
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The ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 comes equipped with two BIOS chips, this means that you have a backup chip in case one of them gets corrupted. The chips are not soldered to the motherboard which means that if you do need to replace one (or both) then it can be done very easily. The P1.10 printed on the BIOS chips signifies which BIOS version the board was shipped with. The Debug LED can also be found in this area, what a great feature that is, at last we have a LED indicator for troubleshooting!
There is an Ultra M.2 socket on the K6 which can be found in the middle section of the board under the second x16 PCIe slot. We here at pcG are big fans of these little devices, so we are very happy to see a slot supporting this on the board, two would have been nice but I think we are getting greedy. 😉
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Before wrapping up the first impressions, I would just like to say how much I like the design of the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6. The contours of the Gaming armor combined with the I/O shroud and how much they almost slot into one another is very sleek and futuristic. The Silver Praying Mantis that adorns the South Bridge in the lower right hand corner is to die for, you almost want to take it off and wear it as a badge (ED: Really, strange man!). I think the Volkswagen badge thieves from the past will be back out in force and K6 owners will wake up in the morning to find their logos missing… 😉
Hardware Installation
A new build was put together to house the ASRock Fatal1ty GAMING K6 motherboard with a new Intel Core i5-6600K Skylake CPU and new DDR4 memory in the form of G.Skill RipJaws 2400MHz. The following components were also used:
N.B. Due to other review purposes we are using the Phanteks Enthoo Pro M case instead of our usual Cooler Master HAF XB Test Rig case.
| Case |
Phanteks Enthoo Pro M
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Power Supply |
Corsair Professional Series AX 760i
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| Motherboard |
ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6
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CPU |
Intel Core I5-6600K Processor
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| CPU Cooler |
Noctua NH-U12S
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RAM |
G Skill Ripjaws 4 16GB
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| Graphics Card |
XFX AMD Radeon R9 290X DD Black Edition
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SSD |
HyperX FURY 120GB
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Installation of the Fatal1ty GAMING K6 was as easy as any other motherboard assembly I have done in the past. The assembly consisted of the board itself, our test Intel Core i5-6600K Skylake CPU, Noctua NH-U12S CPU Cooler and 8GB of G.Skill RipJaws 4 2400MHz memory. With the motherboard assembly complete, I installed it by using the 10 screws (one more than normal) required.
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The necessary SATA cables were connected to the motherboard, I used the ports SATA3_0 & SATA3_4, as these were the ports that the instruction booklet recommended for faster booting. The Seagate 2TB SSHD and HyperX Fury SSD test drives were then attached to the other end of the cables. Next step was to plug all the relevant power cables from the Corsair Professional Series AX760i into the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 along with my single (I know!) case fan. The final cables to connect were the HD Audio, USB 3.0 and the always awkward Front Panel wires. All that was left to do now was to install our warm (especially in a case with one fan) test GPU XFX Radeon R9 290X DD Black Edition. Now let’s get down to the serious business of testing…
Testing Methodology/Setup
For all of our Z170 testing we will be using Windows 10 (DirectX 12), therefore a new installation of Windows 10 64Bit was performed and the following Drivers were installed. The latest ASRock Drivers were used and can been obtained (here). Although the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 has its Drivers and Utilities available on the supplied DVD, we here at pcG try to keep up with the latest Drivers and software where possible.
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* The latest BIOS version (1.30) was downloaded and installed via ASRock’s UEFI based Flash utility and this version was used throughout testing. |
Drivers installed:
- Intel Chipset Driver (Intel Chipset Driver ver: 10.1.1.8)
- Audio Driver (Realtek High Definition Audio Driver ver: 6.0.1.7543)
- Killer LAN (Killer Network Driver ver: 1.1.54.1490)
- AMD Catalyst Software Suite (15.20.1062.1004)
During testing the following tools/benchmarks & games were used/played:
Hardware Performance
The ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K6 booted first time into my original BIOS, during the time I was in this version of the UEFI I did suffer a few crashes. Once I installed the BIOS 1.30 version everything went swimmingly, now with the 1.30 version you are greeted with the EZ Mode UEFI which can be seen below left. During my initial testing at stock speeds 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) I encountered no issues or problems with the board performing perfectly.
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We are pretty well acquainted with the ASRock UEFI as it is the same as our very own test board the ASRock Fatal1ty Z97X Killer. I like the new EZ Mode as it’s very well laid out and easy to use, but, the advanced mode has never been a problem to navigate so I stuck with what I knew. Thanks to ASRock’s Load Optimized CPU OC Setting feature the motherboard can be overclocked in increments of 200MHz from 4.2 to 4.8GHz, very easy indeed. So to dial-in our test overclock of 4.5GHz I just needed to select the 4.4GHz Profile (as seen below left), changed the All Core multiplier to 45 (below centre) and enabled XMP (below right).
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For our testing of Z170 motherboards using our Intel Skylake Core i5-6600K test CPU we will be testing at both Stock (3.5GHz) and at an overclocked 4.5GHz. The CPU-Z screenshots below show the various states (Idle, Stock & Overclocked) of the CPU and its associated voltage.
 CPU-Z – stock 3.5GHz (Idle) |
 CPU-Z – stock 3.5 GHz (Load) |
 CPU-Z – OC 4.5GHz |
- Benchmark Results (CPU @ STOCK: 3.5GHz (1.024v) : RAM @ 2133MHz) with XFX AMD Radeon R9 290X DD Black Edition
| Benchmark | Resolution | Result |
| Metro Last Light | 1920×1080 | 79.00 |
| Unigine Heaven 4.0 | 1920×1080 | 1419 |
| 3DMark Firestrike | Default | 9945 |
| 3DMark Firestrike | Extreme | 5120 |
- Benchmark Results (CPU @ OC: 4.5GHz (1.264v) : RAM @ 2400MHz) with XFX AMD Radeon R9 290X DD Black Edition
| Benchmark | Resolution | Result |
| Metro Last Light | 1920×1080 | 79.23 |
| Unigine Heaven 4.0 | 1920×1080 | 1425 |
| 3DMark Firestrike | Default | 10308 |
| 3DMark Firestrike | Extreme | 5207 |
As you can see from the results above, the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K6 performed very well in our Gaming benchmarks. Compared to the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K4 though which is approximately £27.00 cheaper, you can see that it may be slightly better in some of the overclocked results but not the stock. But, as we have said many times before, you are not going to notice these small differences in numbers when they are equated to Gaming.
The difference between the stock results and the overclocked results are very minimal, especially when you look at the figures for the pure Gaming tests such as Metro and Unigine Heaven. The only test to show any real discernible difference is the 3DMark Firestrike test (default & Extreme), this of course is down to the fact that these tests contain specific CPU ONLY tests and this is what brings the scores up more than the ones in the Gaming test.
Additional Software/Features
There is an abundance of software available for the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6, this either comes with the product or is downloadable. To review all of it would warrant a whole separate review, so we are just going to take a look at the ASRock F-Stream utility which covers a lot of options for the board. Let’s take a look…
Software (F-Stream)
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We have been using an ASRock motherboard as part of our Test Rig for almost a year, so the ASRock F-Stream utility was pretty familiar to us here at pcG. The software pretty much covers all your bases for overclocking and monitoring needs.
When the software has loaded you are welcomed by the main tab which gives you a choice of how you run your system using any of the following profiles: Performance Mode, Standard Mode and Power Saving Mode. Performance mode gives you access to the pre-set overclock profiles that you can see in the UEFI, Standard Mode does what it says on the tin and Power Saving Mode is for the voltage conscious out there, but not us!
Clicking on the OC Tweaker tab at the top will give you access to an overclocking tab, this will give you options that are similar to those found in the OC Tweaker section of the UEFI. Here you can alter your Base Clock, CPU Ratio and various voltages etc.
The System Info tab is pretty much self explanatory and provides you with a mass of information on the status of your system. In the image above right you can see our 4.5GHz overclock and the voltages in relation to it, also, you can see the CPU fan speed. Note that we are using a Phanteks Enthoo Pro M case for this review and the single rear 140mm fan does not show up in the UEFI.
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FAN-Tastic Tuning is a smart little utility that analyses your attached CPU fans and Systems fans plotting and easy to use graph which can also be manipulated. Here you can see the minimum and maximum speed of the selected fan and setup your own performance profile for this fan. Looking at the screenshot above left you can see the default profile created for the CPU fan. The last tab is just an electronic form that can be filled out in the event of needing some technical assistance.
Final Thoughts
The ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6
The ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 arrived at pcG in a large black cardboard box, flaunting the new Praying Mantis logo in the top left corner. The motherboard was packaged well in its foam tray and antistatic bag and the rest of the box contents sat on the cardboard tray above the board itself. You could have wished for a bit more thought to have gone into the presentation to be honest, everything kinda just shuffles about in the box with no real place to sit, but there you go, what’s inside is most important.
The layout of the board is much as you would expect, at least they have not chopped of an entire edge like they did with the budget Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K4. There are a lot of great features like the Power/Reset buttons, BIOS chips, Debug LED, Gaming Armor, Ultra M.2 port, USB 3.1 (type A and type C) and the fact that it supports both AMD’s Crossfire technology and comes Nvidia SLI Ready. The design of the board definitely comes with plus points, it is nice to see that some thought is going into how motherboards look and not just how they perform. I would have liked to have seen a bit of illumination but the Praying Mantis logo more than makes up for it.
When it came to performance the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 did not let me down during my time spent when Gaming, Overclocking and testing. The figures it produced matched or did slightly better than some of the other Z170 based boards that we tested before. Overclocking the Intel Core i5-6600K Skylake CPU was a pretty easy task, just a few settings (please see above) needed tweaking in the UEFI which enabled us to get our 4.5GHz overclock. The ASRock UEFI has always been a pleasure to use, it may not look the coolest or have any fancy animation but it is very straightforward and easy to navigate.
I was happy with the Sound Purity 3 on-board sound card, the audio was clear with good stereo separation and good definition, all this mixed with acceptable amount of bass. You would not want to switch from your dedicated sound card, but it is acceptable to use if you were without one (for a short time).
The Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 motherboard is adorned with a logo of a Praying Mantis, ASRock don’t need to pray, because the K6 has it all; Gaming Armor, Bios chips, Debug LED, USB 3.1, AMD Crossfire technology, Nvidia SLI ready and that great price…
Verdict
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Many thanks to ASRock for providing this sample for review
