ASRock Phantom Gaming B860 Lightning WiFi Motherboard Review

Performance – Part 2

3D performance and games

3D tests were performed on the RTX4080 graphics card from Colorful, which is still one of the fastest options on the current market.
We are starting 3D tests with a Superposition 8K benchmark, where the score is as high as expected.

All the UL benchmarks perform great and even slightly better than expected. Below are our results, which are close to the error margin compared to other reviewed ASRock motherboards with Intel 800 series chipsets.

One more interesting test is the PCI Express feature test. It tells us the actual maximum bandwidth of the graphics card slot. In our case, it’s 25.35GB/s, a typical result without any PCIe riser.

UL benchmarks are mainly known for the 3DMark series, which has been a market standard for years. The new tests provide support for the latest graphics card technologies. However, they’re not games; users often wish to know the results of their favorite titles. Since covering all games is impossible, some selected at 1440p at ultra settings are below.

All the games also give us similar results on all motherboards with Intel 800 series chipsets, which confirms that the B860 Lightning is a perfect motherboard for gaming and provides optimal performance. The best results are the same or 1FPS higher on more expensive motherboards, but again, it can be an error margin, considering we see high FPS in all presented games.

Networking

The B860 Lightning has 2.5Gbps LAN and WiFi 6E. Both options are perfect for even more demanding users. During various tests, we had no problems with the connection quality on both connection types.

Our result for the TamoSoft benchmark is above. The 2.5GbE NIC gives us a nearly 2.38Gbps average. There are always some signal losses and background services running, so it’s about the maximum possible network bandwidth using a 2.5GbE NIC, and we are fully satisfied with the result.

Overclocking

Since the B860 chipset has locked CPU overclocking, we can only push RAM some more. The motherboard could go up to 8800MT/s at Gear 2, which is a good result. It’s maybe not as high as on top Z890 motherboards, but this setting is optimal for gaming and everything else.

Current processors don’t overclock well, so most users won’t see any significant difference between B860 and Z890 motherboards besides additional M.2 sockets and controllers. Some users find the difference worth paying more, but most will rather spend less money when the experience isn’t so visible.