Closer Look
The B860M Lightning arrived in a well-described retail package. The box is the typical size of a mATX motherboard. Unlike ASRock ATX motherboard boxes, it doesn’t have a second bottom, so all the accessories and manuals are on the top.
Inside the box are a motherboard, quick installation guide, SATA data cables, a thermal sensor, WiFi antennas, M.2 screws, and a Phantom Gaming badge/sticker. It’s everything we may need for the installation and more.
The motherboard’s design is identical to that of the recently reviewed ATX version of the B860 Lightning, but of course, it has a smaller form factor. Everything is black, with a colorful PG sign on the IO cover.
Even though it’s not the highest model, it shares some features with the highest motherboards from the new gaming series. We only wish to see any form of easy release mechanism for the PCIe slot as with the installed M.2 heatsink, it’s pretty tight.
The motherboard has a main PCIe slot and one of the M.2 sockets in the 5.0 standard called Blazing. Although we wish for more M.2 PCIe 5.0 sockets, this is enough for most users, especially since we have two more PCIe 4.0 x4 sockets and possible RAID configurations.
The B850M Lightning has a 12+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 true with all the new ASRock motherboards we reviewed.
One of the new mid-shelf chipset’s definite advantages is that it has a Thunderbolt 4 controller as a standard. This makes it more interesting than competitive AMD B850 motherboards, which don’t have fast USB-C or Thunderbolt ports. It’s unimportant for many users, but those who care about fast USB/TB ports and don’t want to pay too much for the motherboard can pick one of the B860 models. ASRock gaming series B860 motherboards also have USB 3.2 20Gbps ports, which are also not always available on other motherboards.
Since I mentioned connectivity, we can count on fast networking. The B860M Lightning has a WiFi 6E/BT5.3 module and a 2.5Gbps Intel Killer series LAN. Both options are not the latest or fastest (this is left for the Z890 motherboards), but they are still fast and more than enough for most users.
The B860M Lightning supports UDIMM and CUDIMM modules up to 8666+MT/s. We could pass 8700MT/s, but I wouldn’t count on 9000MT/s+. It’s still optimal as the best results are at Gear 2, and it doesn’t work past 9000MT/s, while most motherboards can’t handle it at more than 8600-8800MT/s,
Above are some example photos of the test rig. As you can see, the B860M Lighting has only an RGB backlight under the 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.
