ASRock Z97 OC Formula Motherboard Review: Less Lamborghini, More Yellow

Final Words

Ever since the overclocking motherboard market realized that the $200 price point offered a large number of sales, each manufacturer has optimized their product stack to take advantage of this market. The Z77 OC Formula did this really well at $240-250, offering a really nice motherboard for the price and package. The Z87 OC Formula aimed at the $350 crowd instead and matched the price point with some impressive new features, but it lost the sense of ‘overclocking on the cheap’ that the market seemed to like. The new Z97 OC Formula goes back to those roots, and despite the Z97 chipset being more expensive than the previous two, ASRock fits in this model at $210.

So at $210, there is not much room to move in terms of additional features. The combination air/water heatsinks are gone, as is the LCD showing temperatures and voltages. What does stay is ASRock’s Conformal Coating, a superhydrophobic polymer coating that is designed to help moisture run off the motherboard without interfering with electrical signals. From our visual inspection, we can see that the Conformal Coating has been refined to give a much cleaner surface that feels more secure and covered than before. ASRock once told me that the machine that applies this coating can only do three motherboards an hour, which could limit potential sales if everyone went after the OC Formula.

The heatsinks are massive to compensate for the lack of air/water cooling, and for the overclocking element ASRock has included their onboard OC buttons as well as a yellow themed full HD BIOS that lists every option under the sun in a single scrollable menu. I am glad that My Favorites is included so we did not need to scroll down on every reboot during our overclocking tests. The motherboard itself also includes a Killer NIC and PCIe Storage: the SATA Express and M.2 slots share bandwidth however. The M.2 does support drives from 22x30mm to 22x110mm in a PCIe 2.0 x2 arrangement. The PCIe lanes for graphics cards do not use a PLX chip and as a result we can have two-way SLI (x8/x8) or four-way Crossfire (x8/x4/x4 + x4).

ASRock’s use of MultiCore Turbo puts the stock performance near the top but never right at the top. There are a few crucial points to consider however – the Realtek ALC1150 audio comes near the bottom of our testing compared to other ALC1150 solutions, and a 15 second base POST time for Z97 is quite long.

Overclocking performance gave 4.7 GHz at 1.350 volts, which is a mighty fine performance on our middle-of-the-road CPU. There are plenty of automatic overclock options provided, and the 4.6 GHz here would make most sense with our CPU if we had no idea how to overclock manually. Unfortunately there was a snag in our BIOS, and the ‘all core’ overclocking option was not working as intended – using the ‘per core’ option fixed the issue.

Because of ASRock’s desire to push the price point of the Z97 OC Formula down, there is nothing extra in the box beyond some SATA Cables and the HDD Saver cable. Personally I feel that a motherboard like this needs to have something to connect the user to the product, otherwise it just becomes a functional tool rather than a solid experience.

Overall, my conclusion is along the same lines. The OC Formula is a nice $210 functional tool, but there is no sense of fanfare or excitement when using it. There was no time in testing that made me think ‘wow’ beyond the smoother look of the Conformal Coating, and the only thing that might make me remember this board beyond the next review is the fact that the OC Formula line will continue to live on. Any user looking at the OC Formula will enjoy the fact that it performs for sure, but there is not the element of excitement I might have expected from buying a board focused on overclocking.