ASRock Z97 Pro 3 Review

Performance Analysis

Stock speed numbers were solid and while some were a little off the pace, most noticeably in the Media Benchmarks, the game tests were a match for anything else on test. An overall score in the Media Benchmarks of 2,462 was mid-table, for example, although less than 100 points short of MSI's Z97 MPower - our top-scoring Z97 board. Minimum frame rates of 98fps in Skyrim and 30fps in the Shogun 2: Total War CPU test matched the top results though.


Once overclocked, the same was true in the Shogun 2: Total War CPU test but the Z97 Pro 3 lagged behind in Skyrim, languishing near the bottom of the graph. Thankfully its overall score of 2,949 in the Media Benchmarks was above average and only a little way behind the best results on test. There was nothing nefarious to report in the storage benchmark with respectable SATA 6Gbps read and write speeds of 544MB/sec and 522MB/sec respectively - there's no M.2 port to test of course.

Power consumption was on the high side, though, especially at idle, while the RightMark Audio Analyser results were as expected for bog-standard Realtek ALC892 audio, all but matching our on-board Realtek ALC898 benchmark numbers. This was a long way behind the top scorers although they are considerably more expensive.

Conclusion

Perhaps the best thing to take away from this review is that the Z97 Pro 3 isn't likely to hold you back too much when overlcocking. If you're happy to sit at 4.5GHz all day then we doubt you'll have issues and shoving 1.3V through your CPU with it running close to 5GHz isn't something we'd recommend on a 24/7 basis anyway unless you've got the cooling to match.

Overclocking was problem-free too and combined with a good layout and super-low price tag, this is a great way to get onto the Z97 bandwagon. The downside is the lack of features. There's very little here to get excited about and the same goes for aesthetics too. Hopefully some of you can look past these issues though and underneath there's a bargain to be had. While its lack of features - tied in to the extremely low price - pulled the overall score down, we still feel the Z97 Pro 3 deserves an award.