The ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 professional motherboard looks to be in a class of its own both in design as well as performance. Join me while I put this enthusiast class motherboard through its paces. Full story at Techware Labs.

STORAGE AND PERIPHERAL BENCHMARKS CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for hard drives (as well as flash drives) that enables rapid measurements of sequential and random read/write speeds. The USB 2.0 test was performed using the 64GB Patriot SuperSpeed USB 3.0 flash drive: The USB 3.0 test was performed using the 64GB Patriot SuperSpeed USB 3.0 flash drive: XFast …

COMPUTATION AND PRODUCTIVITY BENCHMARKS 7-Zip 64-Bit Edition 7-Zip is an open source file archiver designed originally for Microsoft Windows. 7-Zip operates with the 7z archive format, and can read and write several other archive formats. The program can be used from a command line interface, graphical user interface, or Windows shell integration. Sorenson Squeeze 7.0 Sorenson Squeeze is a compression suite for video. It encodes to multiple …

CLOSER LOOK, SPECIFICATIONS, AND BENCHMARK TESTING PLATFORM Right off the bat, the exterior packaging tells us that this is no ordinary motherboard. The box has a sleek aesthetic that looks like brushed aluminum. The front lists a few of the unique features that ASRock has engineered, such as On/Off Play, along with the supported Intel architecture: The back has a …

SPECIFICATIONS, OVERVIEW, AND FEATURES Here is a quick stat-sheet of the different chipsets and what they offer. As you can see, the Z68 chipset is identical to the P67 except only in two areas: Core elements and enhancements the Z68 chipset brings: To start off the review, I would like to explore some of the unique features of the ASRock …

BIOS AND OVERCLOCKING As we can see, ASRock have done a terrific job with their UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) BIOS. As stated, it looks much more prettier and easier to grasp a hold of than the traditional, bland BIOS screen: Novice overclockers can choose from a veriety of ASRock overclocking fail-safe profiles, which are listed in 200 MHz increments. Also, …

FINAL WORDS AND CONCLUSION As enthusiasts and consumers move on from the disastrous Cougar Point debacle, it is refreshing to see manufacturers like ASRock providing rock-solid motherboards. In essence, the Z68 chipset is nothing revolutionary. It utilizes the onboard GPU offered by the H67 chipset, while retaining the dynamic and massive overclockability via the P67s capability to adjust multipliers when …

TEMPERATURE, POWER, AND EFFICIENCY The ASRock Z68 Extreme 4 yielded some excellent results when it came to overall efficiency: ASRock’s Intelligent Energy Saver (IES), however, is highly worth mentioning, as it has contributed its fair share to keep the entire system as adept as possible. This feature can be found in the snazzy ASRock BIOS, which I will be getting …

Z68 CHIPSET-SPECIFIC BENCHMARKS LucidLogix Virtu In a nutshell, Virtu is software developed by LucidLogix that allows the use of a dedicated GPU and the CPU’s integrated GPU (as present on Sandy Bridge processors) simultaneously. There are three modes of operation: ‘Off’ (use of dedicated GPU only; integrated GPU is not being used), ‘i-Mode’ (integrated), and ‘d-mode’ (dedicated). ‘i-Mode’ is limited to …

OVERALL SYSTEM BENCHMARKS Futuremark 3DMark 11 Professional Edition 3DMark 11 is the latest version of the worlds most popular benchmark for measuring the graphics performance of gaming PCs. Designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX …