[Review] ASRock H97M Pro 4, cheap but good

MoonlightSylv · February 11, 2016

I wanted to write a review on this so I am.

I've has the ASRock H97M Pro 4 for a couple months and It's worlds better than my old motherboard, maybe because it was an HP LGA755 prebuilt board... But I did manage to find both pros and cons of this board.

Specs as listed on the ASRock site:

Spoiler

ASRock Super Alloy
- Premium Alloy Choke (Reduces 70% core loss compared to iron powder choke)
- NexFET™ MOSFET
- Sapphire Black PCB
Supports 5^th Generation Intel^® Core™ i7/i5/i3/Pentium^®/Celeron^®Processors (Socket 1150)
Supports New 4^th and 4^th Generation Intel^® Xeon^®/Core™ i7/i5/i3/Pentium^®/Celeron^® Processors (Socket 1150)
Solid Capacitor design, Digi Power
Supports Dual Channel DDR3/DDR3L 1600
1 PCIe 3.0 x16, 1 PCIe 2.0 x16, 2 PCI
Supports AMD Quad CrossFireX™ and CrossFireX™
Graphics Output Options: D-Sub, DVI-D, HDMI
Supports Triple Monitor
7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec), ELNA Audio Caps
Intel^® Gigabit LAN
6 SATA3, 6 USB 3.0 (2 Front, 4 Rear), 6 USB 2.0 (4 Front, 2 Rear)
1 Printer Port Header, 1 COM Port Header, 1 Thunderbolt™ AIC Connector
Supports ASRock Full Spike Protection, ASRock Cloud, APP Shop, A-Tuning, Full HD UEFI

Software:

After I installed the i3-4170 and RAM, I put it in my case (Rosewill Ranger-M at the time) and loaded into the UEFI-BIOS. The BIOS was well organized but the temps weren't accurate as I ran HWMonitor and even their own A-Tuning software and they reported around 10c less than the BIOS, a BIOS update didn't fix this either. The A-Tuning software is surprisingly good though, aside from the gimmicky features like the X-Fast lan/ram, the fan tuning worked great and made it easy to get good temps and good acoustics. The disk help report was OK, it "caution-ed" my 2nd HDD because of an old Linux partition. The OC-tweaker tab seems like it's for more expensive boards but you can still seem to underclock your CPU, but I wouldn't recommend it. The System Info tab is surprisingly accurate in terms of temps as it shows the same as HWMonitor and shows the same information in a more simple way. The App-shop is good for BIOS and some Driver updates but the apps are mostly gimmicky stuff that I wouldn't touch.

Hardware:

The actual board looks great and goes great with my Black/Blue themed PC, but the layout of some connectors are odd. The HD-Audio port is ABOVE the primary PCI-e port, WHY!? Right beside that there is a 3-pin fan header which also makes NO SENSE! But aside from that the layout is pretty good, the other fan headers are in OK placement, as 3 of them are at the top, not 1 or 2 on the side. The other connectors are in pretty good placements and I like the way the SATA ports are facing the side of the board instead of up. The 4 RAM slots are good for expansion and the board supports 2-way Crossfire which I like, but a thing to note is the bottom PCI-e port is PCI-e 16x 2.0 not 3.0. The IO layout on the back is good, and I'm pretty satisfied with this board.

Pros:

4 DDR3/L DIMM slots
Crossfire support
Looks good
Good UEFI BIOS
Good config software
DVI-D, HDMI, and VGA
4 USB 3.0 ports and 2 USB 2.0 ports
7.1 HD audio
Intel Gigabit LAN
Thunderbolt card support
Swappable BIOS chip

Cons:

Bad HD Audio header placement
Inaccurate UEFI BIOS temps
2nd slot PCI-e is 16x 2.0
Gimmicky apps

Would I reccomend it: Yes, this board is surprisingly good for the price even having thunderbolt card support and crossfire support. I love this board, and if you don't need a K series CPU on LGA1150 then this might be something to look at.

EDIT: Apparently if you use BIOS v1.90 you can OC K-series chips.

Edited October 8, 2016 by ShadowTechXTS

Aruxx · February 11, 2016

I've heard good things about ASRock lately, and having recently built a friend a computer housing one of their AMD motherboards, they're pretty good. The BIOS, while foreign to me coming from MSI, still isn't that hard to understand. Nice to hear some other people's opinions