Hardware ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 Review

ASRock has gone back to the drawing board with the design of its latest Z68 motherboard.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2011/09/09/asrock-z68-extreme4-gen3-review/1

 

on page 5, the Asus Sabertooth P67 looks to have far superior 6Gbps Sata ports to all the others - what does this board have that is different to the others?

With these new faster SSDs (like the vertex3) it would be great to have a round-up of recent motherboards to see how good their 6Gbps sata ports really are, and if they can match the top speeds of the SSD or not.

 

Lags behind? The difference in most of the tests between top and bottom is negligible?

 

The difference between most motherboards in sandybridge range is next to nothing unless your looking at strictly gaming performance. in which case the sabertooth and maximus boards are far and away best buy available

 

But there would be no point buying over a faster board with the same features for less

 

I'm only stun why so much difference even between models from the same manufacturer! How can they be so low compared to others even with this supposed premium motherboard. I understand the rog like or sabertooth motherboards being at the top but the rest, supposed to be neck and neck... The materials must be of a lower quality or something is wrong with the manufacturing process. I'm not saying I'm an expert, indeed I asking for an explanation of how can this happen because everytime small players come into the business the results are the same, they stay below the big ones

 

UEFI. That stuff's newish, not really been in consumers' hands for long and the tweaks available to it are still being worked out. Also, that PLX chip may be introducing latencies into the system.

 

EVGA aren't really below in terms of performance they are pretty good.

"ASRock was originally spun off from Asus in 2002 in order to compete with companies like ECS and Foxconn for the commodity OEM market."

I chose an Asrock motherboard for my GF's 2100 based desktop recently.

 

why that southbridge cover looks like CM V8 cover?

 

I have the AsRock Gen 3 Extreme 4 board. I am not sure what went wrong with your ATTO tests for SATA III 6 GB/S connections but I was curious and so I ran the ATTO one GB (your 1024 KB ) segment test with my Corsair GT Force 3. My read speed was 555.4 MB/S and write speed was 504.1 MB/S. My Corsair GT is a 120 GB SSD and it should be slightly slower than the 240 GB Vertex 3 but I am getting speeds wayyyyy above what you got. I am getting 50% - 60% higher speeds than your test lists.

This leads me to suspect that you either got a bad board or you are not describing which ATTO test you are using clearly. You say you are testing 1024 KB segments which should be ATTO's 1 GB setting which is what I used.

I have done tests with several ATTO settings and I have NEVER got less than 500 MB/S. Something is really wrong with your review and your test settings. I am running a 2600K and maybe that is improving my results but I don't see how. The SATA III interface should be independent of the CPU.

Bit-Tech, maybe I am not understanding your SATA III ATTO test but it appears that your data is far - really far - off of the mark. My Corsair GT speeds are superior to the Asus Sabertooth that you list as the top performer. Something is really wrong with your numbers.

 

I owned this mainboard for a period of one month. While the features are great, the design is decent, and the board looks good, I believe the board to currently be hampered by an early, buggy UEFI BIOS, as one of my three PCIe cards was not recognized (the card was recognized in several other boards, and is now working in my new build), and the floppy controller would allow me to boot at POST, but was not recognized under Windows.

While I received reasonably prompt responses from Asrock America support (being a Yank), I was only told to return the board, by two support technicians. This was despite offering as much information as I could regarding both of my problems --there seemed to be zero interest in troubleshooting my issues, only the desire to get me out of the support queue as quickly as possible. Considering the board looks to be really decent, it disappointed me that Asrock engineering was let down by a support division clearly not worthy of them. After nearly twenty years and dozens of motherboards in my own system (not including the builds I have done for others), I truly believe the board I sent back was not defective, but I could not guarantee that my issues would be resolve any time soon, and I have no idea if my issues were even logged to be forwarded to engineering, which might mean they go unsolved for awhile. I didn't feel I had another choice, sad because I really wanted to like this board.

My experiences lead me to believe that in a few months, the Gen 3 series could be really good mainboards. However, I'd probably recommend that most people hold off purchasing one until several BIOS updates have been made available. I would also advise people (at least in the States) to expect very little from Asrock support. I spent more money on a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD5, and while it lacks some of the Asrock board's features, my PCIe card works just fine, and the board is rock solid with no issues.

 

WOW....

This article about the Asrock Extreme4 GEN3 came out 1 FULL MONTH ago and NOT A SINGLE response whatsoever from Bit-tech to justify their very bizarre and way under par SATA 2 and SATA 3 performance results. I went on Xtrem system (http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums...k-Z68-Gen3-Extreme7-amp-Extreme4-thread/page7 ) and the guys over there benchmarked the same board with VERY different results. Same thing at other sources I've consulted.

It’s clear to me that Bit-tech used wrong drivers, wrong windows configuration, bad SATA cables, a bad drive or all of the above. What’s not clear is **WHY** Bit-tech didn’t even bother to investigate such a HUGE discrepancy. We are talking about 40-70% lower transfer speed from what anyone would expect!!!! Amazing that it totally went under the radar with no comments such as “Those results can’t be right, we will investigate further and update this articleâ€￾. What's even more amazing is Asrock ddbn't demand a reevaluation!!

I'm very disappointed. It surely shakes my confidence in Bit-tech as a reputable source of information I rely on to avoid purchasing bad products.

Ramon