ASRock X79 Extreme9 X79 Motherboard Review

I had never really used ASRock boards in the past, on a personal level, and only being in charge of motherboard reviews saw me having a glance at their potential. After looking at their Z68 boards, I instantly knew they had something special going on. X79 confirmed this, when we looked at the X79 Extreme4 which was one of the best looking boards that had passed through my hands. It also showed great performance and utilised the new X79 structure in terms of benchmarking, overclocking and a nice, easy to use UEFI BIOS.

After concluding the Extreme4 with our “Editor’s Choice” award, we were extremely keen to see what the other boards in the X79 range were capable of, as the Extreme4 comes in as an entry level motherboard in ASRock’s X79 product lineup.

Today sees us taking a look at their top-end Extreme9 X79 board, which offers up a full ATX form factor layout, with eight DDR3 DIMM slots, and a whopping five PCI-Express x16 slots ready for the most extreme gaming experience.

Whilst this board isn’t aimed specifically at gamers, it looks to be more than capable to push things to the extreme, and with a product marketed into the “Overclock King” range of boards, we’re more than aware of the overclocking ability that this board should include. Due to that, we wanted to get straight into looking at how this board can cope with our 3960X Extreme Edition processor cooled by the Corsair H80 and 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 memory. It all seems to be a match made in heaven, at least on paper, so let’s get to it and start with taking a look at what ASRock offer in this extreme motherboard, for extreme users.