ASRock X370 Gaming K4 ATX Motherboard Review

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Great review and the only question I have is on the temperature. Does those temps take into account AMD's reported 20c offset for the 1700x and 1800x? Only the 1700 was reporting correct temps a few weeks ago.

Update: I see were the 20 offset was added in my second look over the review.
 

Thelatestnewbgamer

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why is confirmed G.Skill memory being used. it easily hit's 3200mhz on the tai-chi board. i'm pretty sure this same stick of ram which is a samsung dimm and the Preferred memory manufacture of choice to use when building a high end ryzen system would run 3200mhz in this gaming k4 board,,,this ram was pulled outta my kaby lake i5 system...thanks for the review glad you mentioned the issue with ram compatibility and the generic speed the average user will get if using incompatible memory i imagine the scores would be awesome if you were able to hit 3200mhz @ 14-14-14-34
 

TheTerk

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An in-depth review of Taichi/Gaming K4 and whatever other board I review will be revisited and tested with two different types of 3200MHz RAM with whatever the latest UEFI version is for each product. Stay tuned! lots of more motherboard reviews coming.
 

__Isomorph__

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terk, is there any advantage whatsoever to have VRM @ 16 vs 12 phases? and if no difference, then why the hell is it necessary for the Taichi to have a 16 phase VRM? most other boards i see out there from rival brands are at 8 or 10. please help me make sense of this cryptic nonsense.
 

TheTerk

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@Isomorph, not all phases are created equal. A 16 phase board doesn't necessarily perform better than a 10 phase board.

Ideally, more phases allocated to a particular voltage rail decreases signal noise, component wear, and in some cases increases redundancy. This is useful for overclocking since any noise induced by your workload or overclocking could potentially cause your system to crash. This also assists in spreading the heat produced by the VRMs to different components increasing the likelihood of stability.

Obligatory link to an old article: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-motherboard-voltage-regulator-circuit/4/
 

rugrat

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The lead sentence on my homepage RSS feed is:

"Will the X370 Gaming K4 continue the Fatal1ty tradition regardless of the notion that Ryzen is..."

I came here to finish that sentence,... It's not in the article. Now I'm going to wonder for the rest of the day,..."i wonder what the notion is about Ryzen."
 

Crashman

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You're looking at the subtitle (I won't quite call it a Lede) for the article, which can be read on the "motherboards" category page:
http://www.tomshardware.com/t/motherboards/

 

rugrat

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Thanks Crashman,...There's a heading and then a partial sentence that strikes me as part of the actual article. I guess I'm thinking of a "lead in" or first sentence of the article but subtitle works. Not being able to finish the subtitle myself brought me to the article,...alas, no happy ending.

Thanks again for the link,...now I'll go and find the notion that Ryzen is....:bounce:

"...terrible at gaming."!?...:heink:



 

Crashman

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LOL, I guess it's fighting that notion. As is the editor. He's found that when you use a weak-enough graphics card, it can game as well as anything from Intel. The sad part is, "weak enough" is GTX 970. Yeh, we all need new graphics cards now :/

 

Ramin rostami

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__Isomorph__

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where do you get this notion from?

i read and watched everything i could get my hands on re Ryzen, mobos, VRM and voltage phases, and i feel pretty comfortable now to say that there's been a lot of FUD that has been spread ignorantly or willfully about Ryzen.

for those short on time, this video says it all loud and clear and is the mandatory watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylvdSnEbL50 .

Ryzen is the superior CPU. and ASRock Taichi is the better mobo for stable OC'ing: https://level1techs.com/article/fastest-ryzen-1800x-system-world-2017-03-20






 

Crashman

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It only did poorly in games at launch when a super-powerful graphics card was used. From launch day forward, we saw AMD fanboys using graphics-bottlenecked configurations to prove that Ryzen was just as good in games and better at a few other things. People were angry at Tom's Hardware for not skewing its configuration in this manner.

Since then, there have been several software and firmware patches to improve the performance of Ryzen in places where it had done poorly. But the notion remains.

 

Oranthal

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What ram would you use with the Gaming K4 mobo at a budget of $150 or less for at least 16gb? What is the fastest memory you have gotten to work?
 
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