Quickly to the right hardware equipment …
ASRock B365 Pro4 Layout, Design and Features
ASRock B365 Pro4 RGB lighting
ASRock B365 Pro4 Equipment
ASRock B365 Pro4 Voltage Regulator and Heat Sink
ASRock B365 Pro4 Expansion cards
ASRock B365 Pro4 Memory
ASRock B365 Pro4 Hard disk drive connectors
ASRock B365 Pro4 USB and Firewire
ASRock B365 Pro4 Network
ASRock B365 Pro4 Sound
ASRock B365 Pro4 ATX back panel connectors
ASRock B365 Pro4 PC System
Layout, Design and Features …
The black/white ASRock B365 Pro4 High Density fiberglass Sapphire Black PCB board makes a well finished impression. The motherboard features Premium 50A Power Chokes, 8 Power Phase Design and 7.1 HD Audio over the ALC892.
The ASRock B365 Pro4 offers two fast Ultra M.2 slots for PCIe Gen3 x4 modules with up to 32 Gb/s connection and one M.2 2230 slot for WIFI/BT. The following picture shows the PCIe 3.0 steel slots and the M.2 slots, whereby the upper M.2 socket is even equipped with a heat sink.
We tested the B365 Pro4 with a Crucial MX500 M.2 SSD 1TB SSD, as you can see here with the demounted M.2 cooler.
RGB lighting …
RGB lighting has certainly already become a selling point for many and ASRock has done a lot for this as well. You can connect conventional 5050 RGB strips to the two white 4-pin 12V RGB headers as usual, for example to illuminate the enclosure. In addition, there is a grey Polychrome RGB connector, which supports individually addressable LEDs for addressable RGB strips via the WS2812B.
However, on the ASRock B365 Pro4 there are no RGB LEDs under the chipset cooler, at the audio area or in the I/O cover. If you want, you can equip it with standard RGB Stripes.
The RGB headers are controlled via UEFI or via the supplied ASRock Polychrome RGB LED software. For example, you can select the colors in an RGB color selector and set whether the RGB headers should be controlled separately or together. The lighting can of course also be completely deactivated or used for all connections at the same time.
You can select many effects in the ASRock RGB LED menu, for example whether the LEDs should light continuously, breathe, randomly or be controlled to music and with the addressable RGB connection you even get completely new RGB features like Spring, Meteor, Stack, Cram, Rainbow, etc…
A total of up to 100 addressable LEDs can be addressed individually.
So there are lots of great RGB effects that we presented in ASRock Polychrome RGB Software Video on our OCinside YouTube Channel, where as already mentioned no RGB LEDs were pre-installed on the mainboard.
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Let’s get back to the equipment. On the left you can see the internal USB3.1 Gen1 connector, in the middle the 24-pin ATX power connector and on the right the second RGB connector.
Voltage Regulator and Heat Sink …
The picture shows the side view of the mainboard with the relatively small heat sink on the MOSFETs.
Here you can see the two de-mounted aluminium heat sinks, which are pressed together with the heat conducting pad onto the voltage converters.
The voltage transformer range is constructed conventionally.
Under the heat sink of the ASRock B365 Pro4 a part of the so-called Power Stage is cooled.
Here you can see again the MOSFETs which are responsible for the power supply of the Intel Coffee Lake or Intel Coffee Lake Refresh CPU.
Equipment …
The ASRock B365 Pro4 has numerous features, such as the ASRock A-Tuning Tool, ASRock Instant Flash, ASRock Internet Flash, ASRock Easy RAID Installer, 8 Power Phase Design, RGB, Polychrome RGB and ASRock FAN-Tastic Tuning.
Expansion cards …
The motherboard offers two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots for AMD CrossFireX and nVidia SLI as well as two PCI Express 3.0 x1 slots.
Memory …
The ASRock B365 Pro4 Board can be equipped with up to four DDR4 modules and can be upgraded up to a maximum of 128 GB RAM depending on the operating system used (see list). Here you can see a picture of the four DDR4 memory slots with Dual Channel Support:
The Intel LGA 1151v2 motherboard supports DDR4 memory modules and can be optimized in the BIOS for DDR4-2666 Quad Channel modules.
Thanks to XMP support (Extreme Memory Profile), XMP memory modules are set correctly with a mouse click in the UEFI, but more about this later. Which exact RAM modules are officially supported, one should read before the purchase at ASRock on the memory support page.
Hard disk connectors …
The ASRock B365 Pro4 offers a total of six SATA3 ports.
The SATA3 ports support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, NCQ, AHCI and the Hot Plug function in AHCI mode (AHCI stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface and should be selected for SSDs in UEFI). Thanks to UEFI BIOS, drives with more than 2TB can also be used for the installation of Windows 10 x64. The installation of the drivers ran without problems in Windows 10, so that the 64 bit Windows 10 installation was quickly done.
The Intel B365 chipset supports RAID. The RAID drivers can be installed via the Easy RAID Installer point in the UEFI. The drivers for Windows 10 are delivered on DVD and are also available for download on the ASRock Support page, whereby the Windows 10 installation is currently preferred.
USB and Firewire …
The ASRock B365 Pro4 has five USB 3.0 ports (USB 3.1 Gen1) and two USB 2.0 ports on the ATX panel. The B365 does not support USB 3.1 Gen2 ports! On the picture you can see the USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C port at the bottom right, which can be plugged in on both sides.
Two USB 2.0 ports for up to three optional USB ports and one USB 3.0 header for up to two optional USB 3.0 ports (USB 3.1 Gen1) are available internally. The 20-pin header can be connected either to an optional USB3.0 front panel or to a housing with USB3.0 support.
Network …
The ASRock B365 Pro4 has an Intel I219V with which the 10/100/1000 network port on the ATX panel is realized. The Intel LAN port is WoL capable, offers LAN cable detection, supports energy efficient Ethernet according to the 802.3az standard, PXE and more.
Sound …
The ASRock B365 Pro4 motherboard features the simpler Realtek ALC892 audio codec with content protection, which supports 7.1 surround sound and can only output this analog via the internal HD front panel connector. Since there are only 3x 3.5mm jacks on the ATX panel and no optical SPDIF digital outputs, the 7.1 sound can only be output via the internal front panel audio header. Here ASRock offers more audio inputs and outputs for higher priced motherboards.
ATX Backpanel connections …
From left to right you can see 2x USB 2.0 ports and 1x PS/2 port for PS/2 keyboard or PS/2 mouse, HDMI, D-Sub and DVI-D, 2x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A, 1x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A and 1x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C, RJ45 Gigabit LAN and 2x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A and 3x 3.5mm jacks for sound.
Test System …
Now we come to the Intel LGA 1151 v2 CPU socket. The 8th Gen socket and the 9th Gen socket look like the LGA1151 socket of the previous generation, but can no longer be equipped with Kaby Lake processors like the Intel Core i5-7600K! A new Intel Coffee Lake or Intel Coffee Lake Refresh processor has to be installed to work on the Intel B365 board. The socket was provided with a lever that presses the relatively small CPU evenly onto the pins in the socket. As always, don’t touch the contacts during installation or even bend the contacts in the socket and don’t forget to mount the protective cap on the socket during storage or transport. If the pins are bent and the mainboard doesn’t work anymore, we help you with words and deeds in Intel Forum.
We have equipped the test system with an Intel Core i9-9900K CPU.
Intel LGA 1151 v2 CPUs support Dual Channel Mode only. So the two memory modules are used on the Intel B365 motherboard to get Dual Channel support.
Here you can see again the two DDR4-2400 4GB modules from Crucial in the ASRock B365 Pro4 motherboard.
For tests with the new Intel LGA 1151-2 processors we use the Enermax ETS-T50 AXE DFP air cooler and the Icy Dock MB171SP-B Turbo Swap exchange frame for fast exchange of the HDD or SSD, in our case a Crucial 2.5″ SSD.
This is what the 8 cores (16 threads) of the Intel Core i9-9900K CPU look like in Windows 10 Task Manager at Prime95 full load.
As you can see on the thermal image of the ASRock B365 Pro4 PC under heavy load with Prime95, the waste heat of the voltage regulators and coils could even tolerate a better heat dissipation, the ASRock on other motherboards usually even designed from two large coolers. Without anticipating the next page of the test with the overclocking, the B365 looks bad with the overclocking anyway, so that this ASRock B365 Pro4 is not intended for big heat dissipation by overclocking.
ASRock B365 Pro4 BIOS and Overclocking …