ASRock X79 Extreme9 X79 Motherboard Review

I’m going to say it again, and probably will do whenever I recieve an ASRock board with this design. The styling behind this looks like it was dreamt up by gods, and I’m not a relgious person in the slightest, but only someone special could make a motherboard like this look so attractive.

The black board, silver accents and gold capacitors really show off the sense of style behind the board as well as making it look like it’s worth a lot more money than it actually is worth and that’s purely because it oozes quality in terms of the components used and the general layout.

The board is certainly feature packed with regards to expansion bays, memory slots and SATA ports, making this board so versatile, no matter who it’s aimed at, whether you be a torrent junkie needing mass amounts of storage or an extreme gamer who can really utilise the mass amounts of PCI-Express slots to play the hottest games on the market.

Speaking of being a gamer, the added bonus of the Game Blaster is a lovely finishing touch, which can rival the G1 series from Gigabyte. It offers the two most vital features that a gamer requires from a motherboard, which is the best possible sound, through use of the Creative Sound Core 3D technology, and lag-free gaming through use of the Broadcom Gigabit LAN.

When taking a look at performance, we saw some really promising results, but with nothing dramatically out of the ordinary. When overclocking to 4.6GHz, though we were faced with a few issues, the increase in performance shows that it definitely unlocks the performance behind the components, with the 3960X really being pushed to its limits. The overclock had a few hiccups, but after a while, a nice and respectable 4.8GHz was achieved, which for any user running a socket 2011 CPU will know that 4.8GHz is truly amazing.

No current pricing at the moment from a reputable retailer, though prices around the £250 mark seem to be showing their face around the web. If this is an accurate price, it shows that the Extreme9 can keep up with the likes of the Rampage IV Extreme almost, with a slightly better price point. Hopefully as Intel developer newer waves of processors, we will see them being able to be pushed further, but ASRock also need to develop their BIOS and overclocking tools a little bit further to get them perfect, but they are definitely on the right track.

Overall, the ASRock X79 Extreme9 really does offer it all with a stylish, reliable design and layout, good performance at stock utilising some of the fastest components on the market and hopefully with a good price point to match. The additional extras that come included in the form of the USB 3.0 bracket and Game Blaster really do add even further value to the board and will leave you feeling that you’ve got a good deal, and that’s exactly what you’ve got.