Asrock X79 Extreme6 tested..

[ME4ME]

Recently ive been doing some testing with the new Extreme6 X79 board from Asrock, so i thought i may as well post a quick review about it.

 

 

To start with, the Extreme6 is a typical Asrock motherboard in the way that it offers a lot of features. 8xSATA, internal USB3.0, E-Sata .. you name it, asrock got it.

 

The board also features start/reset buttons, and a handy HEX display.

 

As this is the first Asrock board ive ever tried, it's VRM solution surprised me.

Asrock hasn't an image of being super OC-friendly, but the Extreme6 actually offers a nice 12-phase VRM build around the same Chil controller found on the Rampage 4 Extreme and Radeon 7970.

 

Then the big question; how is the (uefi)Bios? The simple answer is it's good, but with room for improvement.

It definitely doesn't of as many settings as a Rampage 4, and isn't as straight forward as a nice Gigabyte board, but it's pretty decent non the less.

You find what you need, and it works pretty much as expected.

 

 

Results... well, it's hard to impress without a jaw-dropping, high clocking CPU. But the least i can do is show some screenshots as prove that this board actually works quite OK!

 

130bclock:

 

5400mhz Pifast and Superpi 1M. 2133 memory, 2400 doesnt seem to fully work yet. But at 8-9-8-24 2133mhz should be enough for most benching.

 

wprime 12t 1.5v (CPU temp just below zero)

 

and Vantage CPU test...

 

Also did some 3D benching to check 3D performance. Seems pretty good!

 

Conclusion:

For around 220€ Asrock offers a pretty good board, fully packed with alot of features. It actually beats most of it's competitors when counting features, just looses in other places like user-friendly BIOS and overal looks.

OC-whise the board seems solid. It clearly has no problem maxing this CPU, and works very stable even in tough tests like Vantage CPU test.

So all-in-all a pretty nice board with some good potential.

Edited February 17, 2012 by ME4ME

[Leeghoofd]

For that money it's a steal Henry ! UD3 inbound next week, in similar price category...

 

Since the 890GX benching I've got good faith in the high end ASRock boards...

[Hondacity]

@5ghz

 

does it beat the the asus r4e

 

in sp1m

in wprime32

in 3dm11_PT

 

?

 

hwbot guys should have a benchmark table for hardware reviews. like sp1m / wprime @ 5ghz or something similar. it'd be nice comparing new hardware. once ivybridge comes out we would have a reference @ 5ghz

[ME4ME]

Well Honda i don't have the Rampage 4 to compare with. Also i didn't bother to install WinXP.

 

The main thing about this board was to put Asrock to the test and see if it's any good. Asrock has kind of a cheap reputation, and since it's the first board of them i tested, i wondered how it keeps up.

 

Turns out, it can handle overclocking rather well, and was able to max this cpu without problems.

 

5Ghz runs .. well, i don't really see the point since most x79 boards perform pretty much the same. Also, it's difficult to test, and compare. Would you run with Auto memory timings, then you compare stock performance, but not the boards potential. Would you compare at the same timings, you again get a performance number, but you don't know if any board maybe can clock higher than others. It's so much work, for very little. Personally, i don't care about those few 0,1% anymore

[SoF]

1.5V running wprime fine at that speed - seems they did fine on the vrm's...

 

it isn't too hard to make a decent board these days for maxing sandy-gen cpus.

the cheapest and most expensive boards of any mfc mostly have a difference of less than 50MHZ in raw clock.

 

main issue sometimes is ram-capability and some special must have settings (01 tweak, subzero/12x fix etc)