Closer Look
Like all ASRock motherboards, the ASRock B860 Lightning arrived in a well-described retail package. The box is medium-sized compared to the average motherboard box size. It has two levels: a motherboard on the top and a small box with accessories. The second bottom hides the cables and manuals.
Inside the box is a motherboard, a quick installation guide, SATA data cables, a thermal sensor, WiFi antennas, and a Phantom Gaming badge/sticker. It’s everything we may need for the installation and more.
The motherboard’s design is predominantly black. Even though it’s not the highest model, it shares some features with the highest motherboards from the new series, like the toolless PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSD installation and gaming series communication controllers.
The motherboard has a main PCIe slot and one of the M.2 sockets in the 5.0 standard called Blazing. Three more M.2 sockets can be used for SSDs, and they are enough for most users. Z890 motherboards offer more M.2 sockets, but again, most users won’t need so many.
The B860 Lightning has a 14+1+1+1+1 power phase design with 80A phases for the CPU. It also uses high-end 20k capacitors, one of the main features of all higher ASRock motherboards. The power design is more than enough for all current processors. During the tests, we couldn’t hear any coil whine, which suggests the high quality of the design, but the same was with all the new ASRock motherboards we reviewed.
The B860 motherboards offer Thunderbolt 4 with USB4 support and up to 40Gbps bandwidth as a standard. This is an advantage over AMD B850 chipsets, which rarely have 20Gbps USB 3.2 ports.
There is also the Killer E3100G 2.5Gbps LAN, which is optimized for gaming.
On the B860 Lightning, we will also find a WiFi6E and Bluetooth 5.3 module. It’s not the latest and the chipset’s standard, but one more time, more than enough for most users.
The audio codec is unsurprising, as Realtek ALC1220 is the most popular mid-shelf motherboard series option. Although it’s quite old, it’s still pretty good, with an improved PCB design and separated power section.
The motherboard has multiple large heatsinks, enough to cool the power section and new M.2 SSDs. Even PCIe 5.0 SSDs should be fine under the heatsink without additional active cooling (but good airflow, in this case, is recommended).
The B860 Lightning supports all the popular DDR5 memory kits. It also supports a new CUDIMM type of RAM with a built-in clock driver for higher frequencies and better stability. The specifications suggest we can use up to 8933MT/s memory kits. Our Team Group Xtreem 8400MT/s kit could make a stable 8800MT/s Gear 2 but couldn’t work at 9000MT/s or higher. We assume it’s about as high as declared.
Above are some example photos of the test rig. As you can see, the B860 Lightning has an RGB backlight under the chipset heatsink and a long M.2 heatsink on the bottom of the motherboard. All heatsink covers are still eye-catching, and the whole motherboard reminds more of the higher series.
Another great feature is ASRock’s BIOS/UEFI, which I will describe on the next page of this review.
1 comment
It’s great mid range option, I’m looking to build my next gaming PC and was looking at this one, compared to others this one seems the best.