ASR ock Z270 Pro 4

Www.asrock.com $120

This is the cheapest board on test, and in many ways it shows: a shiny finish, lack of cover for the IO, plain silver CPU mount and a lack of lighting. It all adds up to a board that immediately looks less premium than the others. That’s not to say it looks bad. The black and white design has its charm and most of the components are color coordinated. More importantly, this board provides solid performance and overclocking, plus low power consumption.

You also get all the features you should need. Two M.2 SSD slots, an M.2 W-Fi card slot, plenty of connectivity and some basic onboard sound.

The only real stumbling block is the IO panel, which has too many legacy connections and too few USB ports, plus there are no USB 3.1 ports despite the presence of one Type-C connector.

If you’re happy with the basic feature set, then the Z270 Pro4 delivers. It demanded the lowest power draw on test while having no problem running my fast RAM.

Its UEFI is also simple to navigate, though try as I might I couldn’t get the 7700K up to 5GHz. I stuck with 4.8GHz instead, which still delivered performance within 2% of that of the fastest on test.