ASRock X79 Extreme11 Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. ASRock X79 Extreme11: Packaging and Bundle3. ASRock X79 Extreme11: Layout and Features4. ASRock X79 Extreme11: BIOS and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: 3DMark 117. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage8. Synthetic: PCMark 79. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven10. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201211. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.512. Synthetic: Super Pi13. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark14. Real World: Media Encoding15. Synthetic: MKV Playback16. Synthetic: Blu-Ray Playback17. Gaming: Battlefield 318. Gaming: DiRT 319. Technical: Power Consumption20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

Over the past couple of years ASRock have really upped their game and are now competing with world renowned motherboard manufacturers such as Asus and Gigabyte.  We have looked at a number of motherboards from ASRock recently and none of them have failed to impress.  So when they offered us their latest high end X79 model to test, we expected great things. Has it is delivered the goods?

Today we are going to look at the ASRock X79 Extreme11 Motherboard which is aimed at the ‘luxury' end of the market.  It boasts an impressive specification which includes ten SATA3 connectors and four way SLI and CrossfireX support.

It also supports PCI Express 3.0 and features premium gold capacitors and dual-stack MOSFETs.

Features

• 7 x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots (2 x PLX PEX 8747 bridges), Support 4-Way SLI/CrossFireX in full x16 PCIe 3.0 speed
• 8 SAS2/SATA3 from LSI™ SAS 2308 PCIe 3.0 Controller
• Creative Sound Core3D 7.1 CH, Supports Premium Headset Amplifier, THX TruStudio PRO™
• Premium Gold Caps (2.5 x longer life time), 100% Japan-made high-quality Conductive Polymer Capacitors
• Supports Dual-Stack MOSFET (DSM)
• Supports Digi Power, 24 + 2 Power Phase Design
• Supports Quad Channel DDR3 2500+(OC)
• Broadcom PCIE Dual LAN with Teaming Function
• 8 USB 3.0 (4 Front, 4 Back), 10 SATA3 (2 from Intel® X79, 8 from LSI)
• Supports XFast 555, OMG, Internet Flash, Easy RAID Installer, Interactive UEFI, UEFI System Browser
• Free Bundle : 1 x Front USB 3.0 Panel, 1 x Rear USB 3.0 Bracket, CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 Trial, MAGIX Multimedia Suite

ASRock supply the X79 Extreme11 in a large box which reflects the size of the unit within and the plentiful bundle.  It is decorated in a black livery and the front of the box features a series of logos which indicate some of the key features of the motherboard.

This is a gatefold design which opens up to reveal the motherboard within behind a large plastic window. Perfect for a retail store environment.

Turning the box over reveals a detailed breakdown of the features and specification of the motherboard.  While the outer box is quite flimsy, the bundle and motherboard are contained within separate boxes inside this which provide them with a good level of protection in transit.

The included bundle contains everything we could reasonably ask for from a top-end motherboard.  This includes an array of SLI connectors, an installation guide, support CD and I/O shield, six SATA cables, two SATA power cables, a USB3.0 front panel box, four HDD screws, six chassis screws and a rear USB3.0 bracket.

ASRock have chosen to use an all black colour scheme for the motherboard which is sure to compliment most other components well.  The motherboard uses a CEB form factor which is a slightly wider version of a regular ATX motherboard.  It has standard ATX fittings and should therefore fit in the majority of ATX certified cases, providing there is enough room to the right of the motherboard stand-offs.

There is a reasonably substantial heatsink above the CPU socket for cooling the power regulation circuitry.  There is also a thick heatpipe running from this area down the side of the CPU socket to the chipset heatsink further down the motherboard. This features a fan to offer active component cooling.

We find two 8-pin power connectors located right on the top edge of the board, nestled behind the large heatsink.

The X79 Extreme11 features eight ran slots in total, four on either side of the CPU socket.  These support non-ECC unbuffered DDR3 2500+(OC)/2133(OC)/1866(OC)/1600/1333/1066 memory in quad channel mode.

On the right hand edge of the motherboard we find the 24-pin power connector alongside two USB3.0 internal headers.

Moving further down the right hand side of the motherboard we find the wide array of SATA3 and SAS2 connectors.  There are two SATA3 connectors and four SATA2 connectors hooked up to the X79 chipset which support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.  There are also eight SAS2/SATA3 ports connected to an onboard LSI SAS2308 PCIe 3.0 controller.  These support RAID 1, 1, 1E and 10.

The X79 Extreme11 certainly isn't lacking when it comes to expansion slots.  There are 7x PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots in total which can run together in speeds of (PCIE1/PCIE2/PCIE3/PCIE4/PCIE5/PCIE6/PCIE7: x16/0/16/0/16/0/16 mode or x16/8/8/8/8/8/8 mode).

There are two PLX PEX8746 bridges which enable 4-way SLI support in Gen3 x16/16/16/16) mode.

The motherboard also supports Quad SLI, 3-way SLI and 2-way SLI as well as AMD Quad CrossFireX, 4-way CrossFireX, 3-Way CrossFireX and Crossfire X.

There are two 4-pin molex connectors on the motherboard which can provide extra power to the PCI Express lanes if required.

Most of the internal headers are located along the bottom edge of the motherboard.  From left to right we find HD Audio, Firewire, the front panel header, a fan header, two USB 2.0 headers and CIR.

The rear I/O panel supports:

ASRock have used their comprehensive UEFI interface for this motherboard which is one of the best out there.  After pressing the DEL button to enter the BIOS we are greeted by the main screen which displays some basic information about the system.

All of the exciting parts for us are located on the OC Tweaker page.  There are plenty of settings here to be fiddling about with including ASRock's useful automatic overclocking feature.

Moving on to the next page we find all of the non-overclocking settings under various different tabs.

The ‘Tool page has a number of different utilities including the Instant Flash BIOS feature.

On the H/W Monitor page there is a concise breakdown of temperatures, fan speeds and voltages from the system.

The next two pages contain the boot and security settings and the last lets us exit the BIOS.

Overclocking

For our tests we decided to see how far we could push the i7-3930K with the automatic overclocking feature.  We used the 4.8 GHz setting for our tests as we think this is the highest that is sustainable for 24/7 use with this cooler.

In this review we are going to benchmark the i7-3930K at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.8 GHz. We used the excellent Corsair H100 cooler for our tests as it's one of the best coolers available on the market.

Test System:

Processor: Intel Core i7-3930K
Motherboard: ASRock X79 Extreme11
Cooler: Corsair H100
Case: Silverstone Temjin TJ04E
Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-2
Memory: 16 GB Mushkin Redline 2133 MHz.
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7950
Power Supply: Corsair HX 850W
System Drive: Corsair Force GT 120 GB
Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

Software:

PCMark 7
3DMark 11
SiSoft Sandra 2012 SP3
Cinebench R11.5
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.5
VLC Media Player
Performance Monitor
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Super Pi 1.5 Mod
CPUID Hardware Monitor
CPU-Z
DiRT 3
Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

Some very impressive results in this test, especially in the physics aspect of the benchmark.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

Again, we see very impressive performance in this test.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

A very good score in this test, showcasing the system wide performance.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

This result is quite impressive but is based heavily on the graphics performance of the system therefore overclocking doesn't have a significant effect.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

In these tests we see a substantial improvement in performance when the system is overclocked. Fantastic memory bandwidth results too – over 52GB/s.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

This test showcases the performance benefits you'll be able to enjoy in multi-threaded applications with the i7-3930K.  We see a massive boost in performance when the system is able to utilise all twelve threads.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU.

This test shows off the single threaded performance of the system which is quite impressive.  We see a substantial reduction in the time taken to complete the test when the system was overclocked.

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

This is exactly the performance we'd expect from this system.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.09GB 720p MKV file (44mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version of this program with full hardware acceleration enabled.

In this test we can see how the real world performance of the system improved considerably through overclocking.

Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the Matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video. In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play a 1080P MKV file while recording CPU usage using Performance Monitor.

The CPU usage in this test is very low indeed so there are plenty of clock cycles left for background tasks.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 12 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the  Blu-Ray Disc of Independence Day.

Again, the CPU usage is very low in this test and the system barely even breaks a sweat.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

The system performed exactly as we would expect in this test. Excellent results all round.

DiRT 3 was released quite recently and has received a lot of praise from gamers and reviewers across the globe. It is the latest iteration of the Colin McRae Rally series, despite Codemasters dropping the Colin McRae branding. It supports DirectX 11 which enhances detail and brings a number of other visual enhancements to the gaming experience.

Again, these results reflect exactly what we would expect from this system.

We measured the power consumption of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We recorded results with the system at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.7 GHz.

We assume that if you spend this much on a motherboard, you'll be able to foot the bill for the power consumption.

Our overall impressions of the ASRock X79 Extreme11 are extremely positive indeed.  We are especially impressed with it's overclocking ability.

We managed to achieve 4.8 GHz using the automatic overclocking feature which is great for those who don't have the time or expertise to overclock the system manually. Often with an ‘automatic' overclocking setting, there are compromises to be expected. Not with the Extreme11.

If you are planning to build an overclocked X79 system we would definitely recommend the Corsair H100 cooler is it does a great job of keeping the temperatures in check.  This motherboard achieved 4.8 GHz so easily that we expect it would do a lot more with a custom water loop.

Even though the CEB form factor adopted by this motherboard isn't a standard that we often come across, we found that it fitted fine in our Silverstone Temjin TJ04-E case which only supports ATX motherboards.

Although it's slightly wider than a standard ATX motherboard, it has the same mounting points so can be easily mounted in an ATX case providing that it has eight expansion slots and ample room to the right of the motherboard stand offs.

One of the key features of the motherboard is the array of seven PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots that are capable of running four graphics cards at x16 speeds providing they're installed in the correct slots.  The inclusion of eight SATA3/SAS2 ports is sure to be useful for those users who want to run a large array of solid state and mechanical drives as well.

It's not surprising that the ASRock X79 Extreme11 is expensive considering the impressive feature set.

It can be yours for a price of £480 from Scan which makes it ideal for anyone who has recently won the lottery.  Joking aside, if you require the ultra-high end features of this motherboard and have an appropriate bank balance, it's a must have.

For the majority of users, though, we would recommend one of ASRock's more cost effective models.

Pros:

• Excellent overclocking performance.
• 4-way graphics support.
• Ten SATA3 ports.
• Attractive aesthetics.

Cons:

• Very expensive.

KitGuru says: A very capable motherboard that is ideal for people who want to run 4-way graphics.

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