ASRock Phantom Gaming B860 Lightning WiFi Motherboard Review

Performance – Part 1

All tests were performed on the ASRock B860 Lightning motherboard, Core Ultra 7 265K processor, Colorful RTX4080 Advanced OC graphics card, 96GB Kingston Renegade RGB DDR5-6400 CL32 memory kit, and Predator GM7000 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSD. Additional M.2 storage tests were performed on Crucial 2TB T705 PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD. The Win11 x64 environment with the latest updates was used for the tests. Everything else will be mentioned during the tests.

The CPU has no problems to boost up to the expected 5.5GHz.

Memory performance

The motherboard boots without problem with memory up to DDR5-8800. However, for anything above 8200MT/s, we will need a CUDIMM memory series. We use a 96GB Kingston Renegade 6400MT/s memory kit for comparison purposes. I will tell you more about overclocking on the next pages of this review.

As shown on the screenshot from AIDA64, the performance is as high as expected. The new Intel processors have quite disappointing latency, and it’s normal. The latest microcode and Intel patches didn’t help, so we are in the same spot since November 2024.
The B860 Lightning performs well considering used components, and about the same as previously tested Z890 motherboards.

Processor performance and mixed load tests

The rendering benchmark results are pretty good. The same scores are obtained on other ASRock B860 and Z890 motherboards or high-series from competitive brands like Gigabyte.

Above is the latest version of the Blender benchmark, and below are Cinebench 2024 results.

PCMark results are essential as they show how all components work with each other in a mixed-load environment. It can be translated into regular daily work, so what we all do and expect good results. The B860 Lightning performs exceptionally well in all PCMark 10 tests. Below are our results in the Applications benchmark, which focuses on popular Microsoft applications.

Storage performance

The maximum bandwidth with the Crucial T705 2TB NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD was about 12546MB/s. This is pretty good for Intel motherboards, but we can only see the higher bandwidth on new AMD motherboards like the recently reviewed ASRock X870E series.
The advantage of the Intel series is significantly higher low queue random 4K bandwidth, which is essential for games and many small file operations.

USB4 storage has been tested using Thunderbolt 4 with the tunneling option. The B860 Lightning gives us one USB-C port, which is a clear advantage compared to the same-positioned AMD B850 motherboards with no fast USB or Thunderbolt ports.

On the next page, we continue performance tests and focus more on gaming and networking.