ASRock Motherboard Motherboards Z370 EXTREME4

There are a few quirks to this board but overall it is a really solid product with a really good price point.I have run into the following problems:There are 2x M2 slots but when these are active they shut down some of your SATA header slots. I'm not using M2 but I found the sharing of slots to be a problem point when troubleshooting why a drive was not showing up on my system. The UEFI is good overall but the choices are unclear sometimes and the reason to choose one option or another needs a LOT more documentation at times. Example: I am running PCIe SSD boot drive but 2x HDD in mirrored RAID for secondary storage. Okay, right? Except... getting those drives to BOTH show up was tricky and it seemed like everything I was doing should have worked but it wouldn't. It took a lot of fiddling with the BIOS settings to get both to show up then both to allow me to list them in the RAID menu to create the array. Once they did, it was easy as pie and I love that part of it. However I also wanted to attach a 1TB HDD from an older PC into this one to copy files over -- transfer the command to the flagship, if you will. I could not get that to register at all. I tried trouble shooting ports, power cables, settings, you name it. The SATA speed menu in the UEFI (BIOS) was not automatically stepping down to SATA2 for the older drive. I had to manually choose "Gen 2" before it would register and by then something happened to damage the drive controller (though no stars off because I can't be sure that was really the motherboard's fault).Overall the documentation was slim and I had to resort to google and youtube to get some things done that should have been a HECKUVA lot easier to do, but to be fair that's not unique to this BIOS alone.Part of my troubleshooting to get that drive to show up should have included resetting CMOS but by this time my 2-slot video card was already mounted in the top-most PCIe x16 slot and the battery was mounted literally 100% behind the entire card's body at this point. It had a closed loop cooling setup that was a bit of a hassle to fit in and I didn't want to rip it all out just to reset a battery then put it all back in. That's a big of a problem if you ever need to reset CMOS. Same for 4 of the 8 SATA headers -- they are either partially or fully behind the video card making it quite irritating to plug in another drive by sense of feel alone.Apparently something damaged my 1TB controller board during this experience. I'm not placing blame, but when the drive was "bad" the BIOS took a VERY long time to try and reconcile that the drive was bad. I had the boot delay set to 2 seconds and then Windows boots. With the "bad" drive off the system, it did that. With the bad drive in the system, it paused at that "press DEL to enter setup" screen for well over a minute, and hitting the DEL or F2 had no seeming effect for that time, and then only finally after an very annoying delay did it come up. While troubleshooting this became a very irritating issue for me because I had to save settings and try again but it would then feel like it had hung up on the boot, but it was really just trying to recognize the bad drive.The chipset, upper header and lower header are all individually customizable color LEDs built into the UEFI. That's nice. Each can be set differently or all the same. I set them to my preferred theme color and it's good to go. If you disconnect power and reconnect it then turn it on, they all flash white but then remember their saved settings after 1/2 second or less. The white flash is a little alarming at first but no big deal.The header plate for use on the back of my case had 2 round holes for wifi antennae but no actual use for them -- no wifi built onto this board. A little odd that it wouldn't have its own header, but not worth taking a star off for that.The layout overall is good. CPU mounted no problems. GPU mounted no problems. PCIe SSD mounted no problems, all started up the first time. There is a 12v header at the "top" of the board which is inconvenient for my modular PSU. I wish it was located elsewhere. The RAM slots are rather close to the CPU and I was planning to run 4 sticks of DDR. I have 2 for now. You have to check the book because the default slots to run just 2 are not the ones you think. You skip the first and third and mount them in the second and fourth. However, if I had to put another into that first slot it's going to be brushing into my CPU closed-loop pump housing. If you have a large area air cooling setup you will run into problems with the RAM slots. Also, they didn't feel very secure when mounting the DIMMs. I wasn't even sure they had properly seated (yes, they had) because only one side of each DIMM slot has a "snap-lock" mechanism.Pros: Z370 chipset, support for 8th gen Intel chips. Overall good performance, no actual problems once it's set up. Awesome price for the performance you get (almost half of some other comparable boards). USB 3.0. USB typeC integrated port on I/O panel. Booted up first time with no problem.Cons: Very poor RAM DIMM spacing (too close to CPU), SATA headers share bandwidth and also behind video card, CMOS 100% hidden behind video card, awkward UEFI (BIOS) options and unclear documentation on what actually choosing the options does vs just what the overall option relates to. Also not much documentation on hangs/delays or other problems. Weak fan header placement (enough, just in annoying spots).Icing on the cake: LEDs are nice and very easy to set.Overall: despite the problems 5 stars and would recommend as long as you know what you're getting into.

The motherboard has a 12 phase voltage regulator for the processor but I think is 10 phase = processor 2 phase = on board gpu and on board components, good for overclock. Not as important for some, but for me the unboxing process was great, had the manuals very detailed, the box layout was very professional and the motherboard was very protected, comparing it to an gigabyte z370 ultra and the asrock z370 extreme 4 it was like: gigabyte = B- | asrock = A+ . You won't get the flashy rgb leds all over the motherboard, just in certain spots, so if you are looking for an rgb motherboard it would be best to look somewhere else, but performance wise (what matters) the asrock motherboards got a better deal for the price. The Bios UEFI is good, but still Asus has the best layout on BIOS.Had some inquiry about the motherboard and customer service reply on next day, so its fine by my standards.Amazon as always very fast on the shipping and customer service.

None of the USB ports are receiving power. dont buy from this seller.Also the second m.2 slot does not work

Great Motherboard, Had a few hiccups in the beginning, had to return one board as the lights didn't function properly on arrival, regardless of the lights, the motherboard was operating great. Wouldn't initially read a couple of SSD drives but that was due to the drives not being formatted properly prior to use. Lights look/work well with either the BIOS settings or through their Software client. I have paired this board with an i7-8700k and everything is operating well, at least to my standards. Temps for the 8700k are a little high, even being coupled with a Corsair H115i 280MM AIOThis board is also running Corsair Vengeance RGB ram @ 3000Mhz (OC) through XMP Profile which took with no problems to account.I personally enjoy the UEFI and believe it to be fairly straight forward and easy to use with more options than you can shake a stick at. All in all I believe this is a great Z370 Chipset board if you are looking for something to power your 8th Gen Intel CPU and don't want to fork over unreasonable amounts of dough since I find this to be the best bang for my buck in the Mid-Range Motherboard market currently.