If you’re an OC Rookie looking for some extra performance on a budget you might just be tempted to take a look at the Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 from ASRock. It’s an ATX Z170 board that can be had for a very competitive $135 USD which is considerably cheaper than you’d ordinarily expect to pay for a board with the feature set and overclockability that the K4 has.

Tom's Hardware put the Z170 K4 through its paces to determine if a budget Z170 board can keep up with its more expensive brethren. In its favor, the Z170 K4 actually has four more voltage regulators than the absolute budget Z170 option from GIGABYTE, the Gigabyte Z170-HD3. But that does that really make a difference when pushing a Skylake processor? Here’s a sample of what veteran reviewer Thomas Soderstrom had to say:

“Even though the Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 had a slight problem with voltage sag, it pushed our Core-i7 6700K to a stable 4.60 GHz. That far exceeds the limit of Gigabyte's cheaper Z170-HD3, and proves that the higher-current voltage controller is probably worth the difference in motherboard price for any user who relies on the performance advantage of CPU overclocking. DRAM overclocking was another matter, as the board's class-leading 2-DIMM data rate fell to a third-place 4-DIMM stability limit.”

The full review can be found here