Hardware ASRock X79 Extreme4 Review

We take a look at the X79 Extreme4 - ASRock's effort at a low-cost LGA2011 board

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2012/01/11/asrock-x79-extreme4-review/1

 

I was so glad when motherboards stepped away from whiny fans on the sourthbridge, and now they're making a comeback. Pity.

I doubt I'll want more than 16GB of RAM on a board like this; so four DIMM slots is hardly a killer - if the quad core SB-E chips are a reasonable price, this might make a good alternative to the 'downgrade' from triple to dual channel presented by LGA1155...

 

I think that the choice was whiny fan or overheating motherboard, and so the fan was probably the best solution.

 

When I first saw info on overclocking of the X79 platform with non unlocked cpus there was mention that there would be several cpu straps, one at 1.25 and another at 1.65 or something similar.....since then all the mobos I've seen reviews of only have the 1.25 strap......are there any that have the higher strap multiplier to go above 4.5Ghz or there abouts on the locked 3820...I've seen unlocked cpus have been able to go over 5GHz on the X79 mobo's. Would be nice if the 3820 could be pushed to that level with adequate cooling by using the 1.65 cpu strap and dropping the cpu multiplier as required.

 

There are a few boards that don't have fans on the southbridge - Rampage IV Formula, P9X79 Pro, X79A-GD45, G1-Assassin2, P9X79 WS among them. So it's perfectly feasible to have the board passive. In fact having had another look, quite a lot of them are passive. But I was eying this board as I'd rather pay £170 than £300.

 

Thx for the Benchmarking link.

What a difference two years makes, primary rig built in December 2009 (blue signature text). I didn't spend money on bleeding edge components when I built it, spent around $1000 US total at the time (Edit - no peripherals or monitor. Just the tower and the OS). I'm running everything out of the box, no overclocking. However, I run the OS and higher-end games on the VelociRaptor drives that are configured in a RAID 0 array.

I came up with the following numbers...

Image editing: 1200
Video encoding: 2149
Multitasking testing: 1081
Overall score: 1477

A newer video card and increasing my current 6GB of RAM would probably improve my numbers by a good margin, but I just can't justify it until I can't run a recently purchased game at at least high settings @ 1920x1080 resolution.

I can still run Skyrim on High settings with no lag issues... I initially tried Ultra-High and it worked great until I entered the Riverwood Trader. Then it all went to crap. Reset to High and haven't had any game lag issues since.