If you’re looking for a cost-effective board to upgrade your existing gaming setup then look no further, the ASRock Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4/Hyper motherboard retails at under RM 500 and packs quite a punch.
The Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4/Hyper comes in red and black accents, the mark of ASRock’s gaming range motherboard, a full sized motherboard that looks as good as the higher-end motherboards.
At the upper corner it comes with large heatsinks and I/O shield protector.
Nothing out of the ordinary at the DIMM corner but I like it that ASRock placed Chassis fan connectors nearby the DIMM slots for easier access.
Towards the southern side of things the board comes with upward facing SATA ports, 6 of them around the heatsink.
The Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4/Hyper comes with 2x PCI-E slot for multi-GPU configuration (For AMD cards only).
At the rear you’ll seee that the Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4/Hyper has quite a limited number of USB connectors and it has DVI and HDMI output only, no DisplayPort.
The unique features of this board are
1. Fatal1ty Mouse Port – with the F-Stream software gamers can use Fatal1ty’s personal preferred mouse polling rate at 500 Hz while having the flexibility for to adjust the mouse polling rate from 125 Hz to 1000 Hz.
2. Killer LAN – Killerâ„¢ E2400 Intelligent Networking Platform boosts networking performance for time-sensitive UDP (User Datagram Protocol) based applications, such as online games and high-quality media streaming.
3. Key Master – Key Master consists of two major features, Sniper Key and Macro Key. It enhances your mouse and keyboard with customizable macros, sniper modes, key repeat rates and repeat delay.
User Experience
What I like about this board is the Hyper overclocking ability. The board works exactly like the Pro4/Hyper I reviewed not long ago. For the average user who doesn’t know how to overclock, all you need to do is press on the X button on your keyboard when you see the SKY OC details appear during boot up, it’s on the lower right side of the screen.
The system will then overclock on it’s own and you’ll see the 3.7Ghz Intel Core i3-6100 runs at around 4Ghz range.
There’s a slight performance gain once the overclock is done but if you have the knowledge, you could tweak it further. I overclocked my Core i3-6100 to 4.5Ghz and the RAM speed set to 2600Mhz.
Here’s what the performance looks like.
The automatic overclock gained about 7% additional performance while the fine-tuned overclock gains about 25% more! As for the temperature, there’s little to worry about as the Core i3-6100 is a 51W processor (that’s low) so there’s nothing even a stock cooler can’t handle.
The Verdict
The ASRock Fatal1ty B150 Gaming K4/Hyper Motherboard retails at around RM 470, just a bit lower than the H170 Pro4/Hyper, what you get with the B150 Gaming K4/Hyper is the KIller LAN, Key Master and Fatal1ty Mouse Port.