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ASRock H370 Pro4 Layout, Design and Features
ASRock H370 Pro4 Equipment and other features
ASRock H370 Pro4 Expansion cards
ASRock H370 Pro4 Memory
ASRock H370 Pro4 Hard disk drive connectors
ASRock H370 Pro4 USB and Firewire
ASRock H370 Pro4 Network
ASRock H370 Pro4 Sound
ASRock H370 Pro4 ATX back panel connectors
ASRock H370 Pro4 PC System
Layout, Design and Features …
Here you can see another 360 degree view of the ASRock H370 Pro4 ATX motherboard.
The ASRock H370 Pro4 High Density glass fiber Sapphire Black PCB board makes a clean impression. The motherboard features Premium 45A Power Chokes, 10 Power Phase Design and 7.1 HD Audio via the ALC892, but only with three jacks.
The ASRock H370 Pro4 offers two fast Ultra M.2 slots for PCIe Gen3 x4 modules with up to 32 Gb/s connection and a simple M.2 Key-E e.g. for a WiFi module. The following picture shows the five PCIe slots and the three M.2 slots.
We tested the H370 Pro4 with a Plextor M8SeGN 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD.
Unfortunately there is no 4-pin 12V RGB header, but there is an optional COM port, a TPM (Trusted Platform Module), an internal HD audio connector for 7.1 sound and numerous internal USB port connectors.
Here you can see the internal USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 Gen1 connector and the 24-pin ATX power connector.
The picture shows the side view of the mainboard with the small heat sink on the MOSFETs.
Here you can see again the small aluminium heatsink, which is clamped onto the voltage converters together with a heat conducting pad.
A part of the so-called Smart Power Stage is cooled under the heatsink of the ASRock H370 Pro4.
Here you can see again the MOSFETs, which are responsible for a stable power supply of the Coffee Lake CPU.
Equipment and other features …
Now we come to the other features of the LGA 1151 motherboard. The Intel H370 Pro4 motherboard from ASRock included a manual, a DVD, two SATA data cables (angled and straight), three screws for the M.2 sockets and an ATX I/O panel. Additional USB slot covers or an ASRock USB 3.0 front panel are optionally available.
The ASRock H370 Pro4 has numerous features, such as the ASRock A-Tuning Tool, ASRock Instant Flash, ASRock Internet Flash, ASRock Easy RAID Installer, 10 Power Phase Design, Digi Power and ASRock FAN-Tastic Tuning.
Expansion cards …
The motherboard offers two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots for AMD CrossFireX or nVidia SLI. Additionally there are three PCI Express 3.0 x1 slots.
Memory …
The ASRock H370 Pro4 board can be equipped with up to four DDR4 modules and can be upgraded depending on the operating system used (see list) up to a maximum of 64 GB RAM. Here you can see a picture of the four DDR4 memory slots with dual channel support:
The Intel LGA 1151 motherboard supports DDR4 memory modules and can be optimized in the BIOS for DDR4-2666 quad channel modules. The UEFI offers adaptations from DDR4-800 to DDR4-2666.
Thanks to XMP support (Extreme Memory Profile), XMP memory modules can be set correctly with a mouse click in UEFI, but more about this later. Which exact RAM modules are officially supported, one should read before the purchase with ASRock on the memory support page.
Hard disk drive connectors …
The ASRock H370 Pro4 offers a total of four angled and two straight 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 to install Windows 10 x64. The installation of the drivers ran without problems in Windows 10, so that the Windows 10 installation was quickly completed.
The RAID drivers can be installed via the Easy RAID Installer point in the UEFI. The drivers for 32-bit / 64-bit 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 H370 Pro4 has two USB 3.0 ports (USB 3.1 Gen1), two USB 2.0 ports and two USB 3.1 Gen2 ports on the ATX panel. The picture shows the USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A at the top and the USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port (pluggable on both sides) at the bottom.
Internally, two (or 1.5) USB 2.0 ports for up to three optional USB ports and two USB 3.0 headers for up to four optional USB 3.0 ports (USB 3.1 Gen1) are available. The 20-pin header can be connected either to an optionally available USB3.0 front panel or to a case with USB3.0 support.
For Windows 7 there is currently no Intel H370 support! You can install Microsoft Windows 7 without problems with the Intel H370 chipset, but the USB ports don’t work and there are no drivers for the USB ports available. We did the tests with a PS/2 keyboard and tried different Windows 7 drivers, but without success. The problem is that the new H370 chipset has native USB3.1 and USB2.0 support and older Windows 7 drivers no longer work for the USB controllers of the Intel H370 PCH. Even if you should install Windows 10 nowadays anyway, the official Windows 7 support from Microsoft is actually obsolete in January 2020. Whether and when there will be drivers for Windows 7 remains to be seen.
Network …
The ASRock H370 Pro4 is equipped with an Intel I219V, via which the 10/100/1000 network port on the ATX panel is implemented. The LAN port is WoL capable, provide LAN cable detection, supports power efficient Ethernet according to 802.3az standard, PXE and more.
Sound …
The ASRock H370 Pro4 motherboard also features the Realtek ALC892 audio codec with content protection, which supports 7.1 surround sound and can output it 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 considerably more audio inputs and outputs for somewhat more expensive motherboards.
ATX Backpanel Connectors …
From left to right you can see the not equipped WiFi antenna panel, 1x PS/2 connector for PS/2 keyboard or PS/2 mouse and 2x USB 3.1 Gen1 (USB 3.0), D-Sub and DVI-D, HDMI, 1x USB 3.1 Gen2 Typ-A and 1x USB 3.1 Gen2 Typ-C, RJ45 Gigabit LAN and 2x USB 2.0 and 3x 3.5mm jacks for the sound.
Test System …
Now we come to the Intel LGA 1151 CPU socket. The socket looks like the LGA1151 socket of the previous generation, but can no longer be equipped with Kaby Lake processors like e.g. the Intel Core i5-7600K! So at least one new Intel Coffee Lake processor must be installed for it to work with the Intel H370. The socket is equipped with a lever that presses the relatively small CPU evenly onto the pins in the socket. As always during installation, do not touch the contacts or even bend the contacts in the socket and during storage or transport, be sure to mount the protective cap on the socket. If the pins are bent and the motherboard doesn’t work anymore, we help with words and deeds in Intel Forum or English Forum.
We have equipped the test system with an Intel Core i7-8700K CPU.
Here you can see again the new Intel Coffee Lake CPU and the two DDR4-2400 4GB modules from Crucial in the ASRock H370 Pro4 motherboard.
Intel’s Core i7-8700K CPU doesn’t support Quad Channel Mode, only Dual Channel Mode. The two memory modules are used on the Intel H370 motherboard to get dual channel support.
For testing with the new Intel LGA 1151 processors we use the Enermax ETS-T50 AXE DFP air cooler. Here you can see the finished Intel LGA 1151 test system including Enermax ETS-T50 AXE DFP cooler, MSI Radeon R9 280 graphics card and Icy Dock MB171SP-B Turbo Swap removable frame for fast exchange of SSD or HDD.
This is what the 6 cores (12 threads) of the Intel Core i7-8700K CPU look like in Windows 10 Task Manager at Prime95 full load.
And on the following thermal image you can see the heat dissipation of the ASRock H370 Pro4 motherboard.
As you can see on the thermal image of the ASRock H370 Pro4 PC, the heat distribution of the voltage regulators and power chokes could use even better heat dissipation, which ASRock usually realizes even with two large coolers on other motherboards. But without anticipating the next page of the overclocking test, the overclocking of the H370 looks bad anyway, so that this ASRock H370 Pro4 is not intended for high heat generation through overclocking.
ASRock H370 Pro4 BIOS and Overclocking …