Fatal1ty H97 Performance

$100 ASRock

There’s a lot to like about this well-priced H97 board. It may not have the next-gen PCIe storage connections, but it’s got a decent feature set. The back panel is well-stocked, there’s a host of fan connectors for extreme cooling, it’s got a pair of PCIe 3.0 GPU slots and AMD CrossFireX support too. The board toes the line on the onboard audio front too, providing electrical shielding.

It’s also an impressive performer in the benchmarks. Its straight CPU performance is only bested by the Republic of Gamer boards of this generation. The storage performance is equally good and the gaming benchmarks right up at the top of the class.

Something had to give though— and I’m not talking about the flimsy, bendy circuitboard. Something is stopping this motherboard from overclocking. The sparse power componentry around the CPU socket is one suspect, but I think it’s more likely a BIOS problem. All the settings are available in the BIOS, but the CPU refused to shift above its stock speed.

Hopefully that failing will be rectified in a firmware update, but right now that flakiness is what’s stopping me from being able to recommend what would otherwise be an excellent H97 alternative.