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ASrock have a huge variety of motherboards in their line up right now and they seem to be focusing on the lucrative 1156 market, with eight models currently on offer.
Today we are going to look at their latest board, the P55 Extreme4 which has a very impressive feature list, with particular emphasis being made on the 10 phase voltage regulator circuit (with ferrite chokes), four SATA 6Gbps ports (SATA3) and four USB 3.0 ports. The board also supports SLI/Crossfire and uses solid capacitors with an indepth POST Diagnostics display. Additionally it has some very helpful, automated overclocking options to aid the end user while supporting DDR3 memory up to 2600mhz.
- ASRock DuraCap (2.5 x longer life time), 100% Japan-made high-quality Conductive Polymer Capacitors
- Supports Dual Channel DDR3 2600+(OC)
- Supports ATI™ CrossFireX™ and Quad CrossFireX™; NVIDIA® SLI™ and Quad SLI™
- 2 x Front USB 3.0 ports, 2 x Rear USB 3.0 ports, 4 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors
- Dr. Debug, Smart Swith Design: Power/Reset/Clear CMOS Switch with LED
- Supports ASRock Instant Boot, Instant Flash, OC Tuner, IES, OC DNA, AIWI, APP Charger, Good Night LED, Multi-Speed Fan Control
- Combo Cooler Option (C.C.O.)
- 7.1 CH HD Audio (Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec), THX TruStudio Pro™ and Premium Blu-ray audio support
- ErP/EuP Ready
- Free Software : CyberLink DVD Suite – OEM and Trial; THX TruStudio Pro™ – OEM
- Free Bundle: 1 x ASRock SLI_Bridge_2S Card, 1 x Front USB 3.0 Panel
Well this seems like a very good value for money product especially with sata 6 and usb 3.0 support. front panel idea is nice also.
Well I wasn’t expecting such a positive review, but after reading it all, it certainly appears to be delivering the goods.
Very well rounded mobo that, tons of connectivity and good overclocking options also.
That is an awesome board, totally stunned me how good it is. I might look at one of these in a month or so for my 750. my current motherboard sucks and I cant get the CPU past 3.5ghz!
Its really attractively designed too. no real design flaws I can see. such as sata ports being blocked by gfx etc.
ASRock are unfairly seen sometimes as a purely budget maker with no frills designs. This goes some way to change that with this audience I feel.
Well color me impressed with this.
That looks to be a board that has spent some time on the development table. shame it doesnt have a dedicated controller to keep bandwidth higher when sata, USB and PCI are used however. thiat might be an issue for some people.
I have never owned an ASROCK board, but im going to see what AMD products they support now with mobos. seem good prices.
SATA 6, USB 3, loads of ports, front mounted panel, good manual, plenty of cables. strong power delivery, SLI and Crossfire support. RAID, Anything it doesnt have?!
Very good review, I actually read another review of this via google, ill not say the site name, but it sucked. this gives a lot more info and some testing also which helps!
Very good review, I actually read another review of this via google, ill not say the site name, but it sucked. this gives a lot more info and some testing also which helps!
Bookmarked to read later in depth. very good support out of the box. Very good design.
Well the review is great. product looks brilliant, and I just bought a 655k to go with a good board. So where the hell can I buy the fucking thing ? 🙂
Can not see it for sale anywhere. what is the point? any ETA on release?
I like the bundle deal with it, seems they put almost everything in I could think of. ASRock availability is always poor however, really difficult to buy here.
Been looking at another review of this earlier this week, but they did no testing for some reason which seems pointless. its nice seeing some tests. seems to perform well with the 750 which will appeal to be a big audience. I know some people have struggled to hit 4ghz with a 750, even manually overclocking. What settings did the board set up Zardon for 4GHZ ?
Great testing and solid review product. Liked the bios page, good detail in there.
Christ the captcha interface does my head in. fourth time lucky to get a comment submitted here !
GOOD REVIEW, there thats all I wanted to say.!
Did you try it with any dual core 1156’s? good overclocking settings in there also?
Zardon I bought a 875K after your article last month – how far did you get with this board and it ? have you tried it yet?
Wicked board, nice to see some of the smaller players bringing out good overclocked products.
STill, dont think I would touch ASRock, always been a doubt for me as to reliability.
You get far too much hardware to test. annoys me 🙂
The heatsinks are really great design. weird there is no heatpipe though between them.
I am impressed with this product, it has a good mixture of features and performance.
I need to get a 750 and this board, I suck with overclocking and I love the idea of this doing all the work for you.
This isn’t the first board to offer overclocking pre sets, but they seem to work well,. never a bad thing.
Very good to see sata 6 and USB 3 support on such a fine level. makes this board well worth buying
Gets my vote, nice featureset and the sooner more MAKERS START USING USB 3 the sooner more devices will come out with support. annoys me how slow USB 3 is being adopted..
its such a shame this platform doesnt offer tri channel memory support. I know thats for 1366, but it would be a nice addition if it was possible.
the i5 platform is good, much better value than 1366 i7
this is great, thanks for the review.
Very good looking product from ASrock – seems to be a good 1156 board for the money, shame I dont have a 1156 cpu.
I would be curious to see AMD AM3 mobo review from ASrock’s portfolio. 890FX Extreme4 maybe 😛 Does anyone know does that mobo support using USB 3.0, SATA3 and PCI-e 16x / dual x8 at the same time? As this Intel based mobo doesn’t. I suppose that’s one kind of a bottleneck if one wants to futureproof his/hers computer…
What does it mean: “This motherboard however doesn’t use a PCI Express chip which means potentially there is a possibility of dropped performance when utilising PCI Express 16x slots, USB 3.0 and Sata 600 ports simultaneously.”?
I’m having a WD Black 640 Sata III 6GB/s and I need maximum performance!
P55 chipset has 16 physical lanes of PCI-E gen. 2.0. The lack of another PCI-E chip which generates logical lanes means tt when connecting your Sata3 drive, those 16 lanes will become 8lanes for video card + 8 lanes for your hdd. 8lanes * 500MB/s per lane is enough bandwith for using /w both USB3 & SATA3 simultaneously.