ASRock X79 Extreme4 X79 Motherboard Review

Starting with the styling, I instantly fell in love with it as it just looks to be the most sophisticated X79 board on the market, sure we have the Asus ROG board, and the Gigabyte G1 boards but they have a slightly different market, whereas the Extreme4 just goes for the upper higher-end of the market in terms of styling, but offers a price tag that we can all be comfortable with.

Price wise, you’ll find the X79 Extreme4 at an extremely attractive £189.35 which leaves us quite gobsmacked to be honest as it has the majority of features that other brands cater for, so how have they managed to get it so cheap? Sure it only has four memory slots, but for the majority of users out there, you’ll find that four is plenty and besides that you’ll be too busy drooling at the sheer styling of the board with its black and gold awesomeness.

Feature wise, it allows for a nice variety of configurations with your graphics cards, and allows for 3-Way CrossFireX or SLI, depending on your preference. It also has an ample amount of SATA3 and USB 3.0 ports for those with the need for extra connectivity. Couple all of this with a plethora of audio connectors, eSATA and PS2 keyboard AND mouse, and you can’t really grumble too much, as we ask you, what’s missing? Not much from what we can see, though we would have liked a few more USB 3.0 ports, but even then, from my day to day usage, I typically only use USB 3.0 once or twice, and that’s from use of a single USB flash drive.

Taking a look at the performance, we can see that the potential is there, but wish that their were more applications that could really utilise the new technology that Intel have put into their processor, as this will reflect on how well the motherboard can cope with it, especially when stressed. We saw this slightly in terms of Cinebench and Super PI as they really are CPU intensive applications and it shows that overclocking the CPU can really start to give fantastic results.

We were pleased with the overclocking aspects of this board as it does what it’s set out to do, but isn’t as user friendly as we’d like, but that’s down to us liking Asus boards with a passion and that’s a hard market to compete in. It certainly has the right idea behind it, and a BIOS update or few later, should rectify the few problems that we found from tweaking things bit by bit.

As I sit writing this review, I still find myself catching the glimmer of the board from the corner of my eye and getting distracted to say the least, and I’m not sure whether that should be counted as a good or bad point, though having it sitting in a well designed chassis and some watercooling, you’ll definitely be the talk of the party.

If we were building a system with this at the heart of it, a nice set of 16GB black memory modules such as the Corsair Vengeance would compliment it very well, and a nice watercooling block with a custom colour would certainly match up well, and to be frank any colour would go nicely with this, as though the PCB is brown, from a distance and in certain light angles, it does look black and that’s a big plus in our books.

Overall, we have to look at the merits of the board and that mainly comes down to the styling, value and performance and whilst the overclocking features can be improved, we were still able to get a stable overclock that can’t be dismissed. If you’re in the market at moving over to X79 and don’t want to break the bank, whilst keeping the new technology and functionality, then you can’t go wrong with the ASRock X79 Extreme4, it simply does what it’s meant to, and does a great job at it too.