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ASRock H170M Pro4
ASRock sent a total of five samples. My selection of the H70M Pro4 was somewhat arbitrary. I would have used the company's mini-ITX offering, but MSI's single submission was in that form factor, so I chose what was probably the next one in the shipping box.
In the box, you get the board, rear I/O plate and a paltry two SATA power cables. There is a driver CD, and a glue-bound 7 1/8 x 5-inch manual that will not lie flat. The text is very small. You get English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish and four pictographic Asian languages, plus Bahasa Indonesian.
There is a tiny screw for the M.2 slot, which has not been preinstalled on the board. One thing that is present on the board is a jumper cap for the CLR_CMOS function. That jumper is on the left edge, just behind the front panel and speaker headers. Other than a chassis fan connector (which is to the left of the VRM heat sink), all other jumpers are arranged on the outer edges of the board, convenient to cable management openings.
The battery is between the CPU socket and the PCIe X16 slot, and will not be blocked by a graphics card. Four of the SATA 6Gb/s ports are on the left of the front edge, facing forward, so long cards will not block them. The other two are to the left of the ATX power connector, and point straight up. They're behind a long graphics card, though, and would not be blocked. These two ports are disabled if a SATA drive is installed in the M.2 slot, which is to the left of the PCIe X16 slot. The four DIMM slots accept DDR4, and have latches only on the right side. ASRock claims this board has six VRM phases, however there are five chokes in front of the VRM components that are covered by a heat sink, and there are two more to the right, each with a pair of solid state parts suggesting there may be seven phases. Speaking of the heat sinks, that orange really stands out, and I rather like it.
I've always found the ASRock BIOS easy to use. In easy mode, it looks like this:
If you choose Advanced mode using the F6 key, you will see this:
If you've used an ASRock board before, this will look familiar. The OC Tweaker tab brings you to further screens. The one for CPU settings is here:
Since this is not an overclocking chipset, there isn't much to actually do here. The RAM settings are on this screen:
The Tool page has a number of useful functions, from driver installation and BIOS updates to a feature parents can use to limit when this machine may be online:
