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Benchmark Results & Final Analysis
From our prior reviews, the closest competitor to ASRock’s Fatal1ty H370 Performance is Gigabyte's H370 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi. Besides having the same form factor and being marketed to similar customers, the two are a dead match through our entire benchmark suite.
Synthetic Benchmarks
Even in Sandra Memory Bandwidth, the two ATX boards produce performance that’s close enough to squash any noticeable difference in the second-most-impacted synthetic, Sandra Cryptography.
3D Games
The lack of noticeable memory performance difference leaves the Fatal1ty H370 Performance and H370 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi tied across our entire gaming suite. Even the fractional BCLK manipulations often found at the 100MHz setting of most Z370 boards have been stomped out when pairing Coffee Lake with the H370 chipset.
Timed Applications
The close performance between the Fatal1ty H370 Performance and H370 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi continues through timed tests, with differences between the two products approximate to variations between consecutive benchmark runs.
Power, Heat, & Efficiency
The Fatal1ty H370 Performance's power levels idle slightly higher than H370 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi, but ASRock's board also draws slightly less power under full CPU load.
The Fatal1ty H370 Performance also runs a little warmer than the H370 Aorus Gaming 3. While the Mini ITX sample was even hotter, we can attribute at least part of that higher temperature to its smaller voltage regulator heat sink. As shown by the B360M Mortar, Micro ATX doesn’t have Mini ITX's problems.
A scant 0.3% performance difference separates the Fatal1ty H370 Performance from the H370 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi, and that’s too small to offset even its tiny difference in power consumption. The ASRock board loses this efficiency battle.
Final Analysis
Priced $15 lower than the H370 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi, the ASRock Fatal1ty H370 Performance comes up short by about $20 in features, maybe a little less based on bulk discounts of the competitor’s WiFi controller, or maybe a little more given the competitor’s additional RGB lighting at the DIMM slots and front edge. Sure, some people don’t care about lighting, but those who do will certainly find the Fatal1ty H370 Performance DIMM area…dim, unless they splurge on lighted memory modules.
The one thing that held the H370 Aorus Gaming 3 WiFi back from an award was that we thought the $140 product should have been priced at around $130. At $125, the Fatal1ty H370 Performance loses enough features to make its prime competitor look like an even better value than we first assessed.
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