Product Showcase

The Z170 chipset will bring six Intel chipset based SATA 6 Gb/s storage ports to the motherboard. With an added ASMedia controller two more have been added. SATA Express is supported. Interesting to see is the M.2. PCI Express slot, this received an upgrade from 1x PCI Express lane towards x4, giving the port not 10 GB/sec but 32 GB/sec performance.  Mind you that it is a shared slot, so if you use M.2. then SATA port 0 and 1 will render themselves shared as M.2. uses these. There are plenty USB 3.0 and 3.1 ports available though internal connectors motherboard connectors.

Located just under the DIMM slots we can spot two buttons, ASRock will deliver power and reset buttons on-board. 

You will get four DIMM slots at your disposal, they offer support for dual-channel DDR4 memory up to even 3600 MHz (OC). You can install a maximum of 64 GB in total. XMP 2.0 must be supported for your DDR4 memory. We'll show you this configuration running at 2133 and 3200 MHz.

The board has a dual-bios, if you screw up an update or whatever, flick a micro-switch on the PCB and you will be booting again from your fail-save BIOS. Overall a terrific design really, aesthetically pleasing to the eyes as well.
 

To the bottom you can see a Diagnostic post LED, it will display the status/post code. Once you have booted into Windows it will display the package temperature of your processor. To the right you can see the two BIOSes, if you screw them both up, you can pull them out and replace them manually even.