ASRock Motherboard Motherboards Z370 Gaming-ITX/AC

I bought this Mobo because I wanted something small and compact, I know I'm losing out on full size atx or m atx features but I was okay with it. I mainly used it for: Gaming primarily, some web surfing, watching YouTube, web browsing etc. I never had any issues like some of the reviews mentioned and I bought mines used from Amazon. I also even updated the bios on it so it can use the 9th gen intel CPU , I used a USB and flashed it I tried windows bios update but had no luck (I was probably doing it wrong and too lazy to figure it out but USB was way easier for me), I'm still running on the 8th gen CPU as I don't feel like forking out the money to buy a 9th gen CPU at the moment but I just wanted it ready for it when the time to upgrade arises. Overclocking was fairly easy with i5 8600k as the Mobo software has presets, I had it set up at 4.7ghz for presets . I also have a gigabyte Mobo z390m and it over clocks right about the same frequency 4.8ghz on presets. I'll probably do an update on this review if anything ever goes wrong with this Mobo but so far so good, not to bad for a small little Itx board I must say and it's price! Also I'd like to add when I handle my motherboards I always ground my self using a grounding strap and I also ground the matt or surface and I never have any issues.

This is the only mini ITX board I could find that wasn't a fortune and supports thunderbolt. It looks really nice, and fits perfectly in my mini-itx case. Had no issues setting it up, and was easily able to overclock a i7-9700k with 3600mhz ram with no issues. Thunderbolt is a godsend as I have a lot of external drives that use it. You can also use it for a GPU breakout box, additional monitor, 10gb network connecter, etc.A lot of people are complaining about the Bios software, however I find it very well laid out and very easy to navigate. It allows for command line input to if you want to go the full extreme route. So not sure what the issue is.All in all its a great board and is serving me very well.

So far, I am not completely satisfied with the quality of this mother board. It arrived with bent pins where the CPU sits. This was because the plastic part came loose and was not inside the locking mechanism. I was able to bend them back no problem. However, the Bluetooth doesn't work at all. What ever is connected to the Bluetooth must be sitting less than a foot away in order to connect. I had an external Bluetooth adapter which I used with my last which works for now. I also had issues connecting the graphics card at first. It was not being recognized. I had to reseat the card 3 times and then it started working. If I could have waited longer, I would have shipped it back. But everything is working great at the moment. I will likely look at upgrading this component later, but it is working for me for now.

Upon product arrival, I noticed 2 gold capacitors were bent inward towards the center of the board which led me to inspect the board more so. I turned the board over to inspect the M.2 port and condition, seemed fine. However looked at the back of the motherboard as a whole, there were stress marks across the entire PCB. Not sure if this was due to the transportation during delivery, or if it was manufacture quality control failure.Bench tested product with x1 4GB DDR4 PC2666 Ballistics ram, the Noctua Silent NH-L9I quiet 120mm CPU cooler along with XPG GAMMIX PCIe 128GB NVMe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 SSD to get the system to post.Product is defective and will need to be replaced putting my customers custom HTPC order on hold.