Damn it Intel, finally we’re having budget boards for Coffee Lake from all brands, the B360 Gaming K4 from ASRock here retails at RM 525 and it’s certainly a great board to pair with Non-K Intel Coffee Lake processors.
Now as you can see, the box retains the GAMING theme of red and black but the board itself is now totally greyed out. I like it that it is now color neutral for parts matching but it is also sad to see that the line-up lost its identity.
The design of the heatsink and IO covers are great, I have no complaints about them and I like how they fill up the space at the upper corner, covering the 10-phase power design that’s more than enough for Intel Core i7 processors.
Moving to the other corner, we see that it’s nothing out of the ordinary for this board. The memory supports only up to DDR4-2666 speed, this means you can put higher speed RAM but speed will be capped at 2666.
On the other side you’ll see that the board comes with 6x SATA ports, nope no LED indicator or power / reset buttons. These goodies are often not found on lower end boards.
The board comes with 2x PCI-E x16 slots and AMD CrossFire support but the CrossFire configuration is at x16/x4 so I wouldn’t recommend doing so.
As for the M.2 connectors, there’s 2 for drives and 1 for WiFi module.
The I/O panel at the rear is plenty sufficient for most users.
– 2 x Antenna Ports
– 1 x PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard Port
– 1 x D-Sub Port
– 1 x HDMI Port
– 1 x DisplayPort 1.2
– 1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port
– 2 x USB 2.0 Ports (Supports ESD Protection)*
– 1 x USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A Port (10 Gb/s) (Supports ESD Protection)
– 1 x USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C Port (10 Gb/s) (Supports ESD Protection)
– 2 x USB 3.1 Gen1 Ports (Supports ESD Protection)
– 1 x RJ-45 LAN Port with LED (ACT/LINK LED and SPEED LED)
– HD Audio Jacks: Rear Speaker / Central / Bass / Line in / Front Speaker / Microphone (Gold Audio Jacks)
*1 x Fatal1ty Mouse Port (USB 2.0) is included
It’s worth noting that being a Gaming series board it comes with Key Master, F-Stream and Fatal1ty Mouse Port.
User Experience
The board performs as it should and I have no complaints about it, the features are all there – tweak all you want, just know that this board isn’t made for overclocking even though some features look like it is ever ready to make your processor go beyond default operation specs.
While the board comes with ASRock Polychrome RGB for lighting configuration, the board itself does not come with RGB light management utility. Fortunately you can still manage the lights using the ASRock software.
Just to re-iterate an earlier point – this board supports only up to DDR4-2666 speed, and it doesn’t seem to have the ability to load XMP profile.
The Verdict
The ASRock Fatal1ty B360 Gaming K4 retails at RM 525 and comes with 3-years warranty from ASRock, certainly an excellent choice of motherboard for those intending to run non-K Intel Coffee Lake processors.
Do drop by their Official Product Page for more details.
