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, even though we just saw a premiere of the RTX5000 series graphics cards.
The Superposition benchmark at 8K display resolution gives us a typical score.
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 B860 and Z890 motherboards.
The PCI Express feature tests suggest no problems with the main PCIe slot bandwidth, as 25GB/s is a typical result for new motherboards.
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 B860 motherboards, which confirms that the B860M Lightning is a perfect motherboard for gaming and provides optimal performance. The best results are the same or 1FPS higher on more expensive Z890 motherboards.
Networking
The B860M Lightning has a 2.5Gbps LAN and WiFi 6E/BT5.3 controllers. Both options are optimal for even more demanding users. We wish to see the latest revisions of these controllers, but it’s not an issue, considering the B860 is not the highest chipset.
During various tests, we had no problems with the connection quality on both connection types.
Overclocking
Since the B860 chipset has locked CPU overclocking, we can only push RAM some more. The motherboard could go up to 8733MT/s at Gear 2, which is a good result, but one memory ratio lower than we could set on the ATX version of the B860 Lightning.
The B860M Lightning gives us a high performance out of the box while overclocking doesn’t matter much as the new processors are very limited regarding higher frequencies. Most users shouldn’t see any difference between the B860 and Z890 chipsets unless they need more M.2 sockets or a specific faster connectivity controller.
