ASRock X79 Extreme9 X79 Motherboard Review

When we looked at the X79 Extreme4 we were blown away by its stylish looks and the Extreme9 is the same with a dark PCB, black slots and gold capacitors. The board is certainly feature rich from a first glance with plenty of expansion slots, SATA ports and much much more.

Around the CPU socket we find a heatpipe design joining the two passive heatsinks which cover the VRM and MOSFETS. The socket area is quite large, due to the size of the processors, and plenty of room is available for larger coolers.

Moving away from the passive design, we find ASRock’s patented X-Fan active cooling solution, which is situated over the Intel X79 chipset. The active cooling solution pushes air down towards the bottom of the board and is essential for overclocking X79 to extreme limits.

Being an X79 board, we find there are four memory slots on each side of the socket. This offers up quad channel architecture and supports XMP memory modules.

Memory support sees up to 64GB in size over the 8 DDR3 DIMM slots. The slots support DDR3 2400+(OC)/2133(OC)/1866(OC)/1600/1333/1066 non-ECC, un-buffered memory.

Moving over to the expansion slots, we find five PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, of which can run in various configurations including x8/x8/x8/x8 or x16/0/x16/0 and really does depend on what type of graphics card configuration you will be running. There is also a single PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slot.

Keeping with the expansion slots, though there is a single x1 slot, it will end up being populated from the Game Blaster expansion card. This gives you coaxial, optical and 7.1 channel HD audio, as well as Broadcom BCM57781 Gigabit LAN which also has teaming functionality when used in conjunction with the rear I/O panel’s Gigabit LAN.

Moving further down, we find the usual front panel connectors including 1394a FireWire, COM port, clear CMOS, USB, fan headers as well as some relevant overclocking tools. This includes a power and reset button and debugging LED panel for quick troubleshooting, which are all vital when overclocking to the extreme.

There is also two USB 3.0 headers which allow four USB 3.0 devices to be connected with two per connector, much like the USB 3.0 bracket that ASRock bundle with the board.

This board is far from short in terms of SATA ports. There are a total of twelve SATA ports in total, of which four are SATA 3Gb/s compliant, while the other eight support SATA 6Gb/s speeds. All ports support RAID 0 and Raid 1, whilst only the Intel X79 based slots support RAID 5, Raid 10 and IRST, and the Marvell based ports do not.

We don’t normally focus on the power aspects of a board, but being X79 based and boasting some impressive power features, we wanted to see what it was all about, and doing so we find the typical 24-pin ATX power connector.

Towards the top of the board, we find two 8-pin power connectors which delivers sufficient power to the Socket 2011 processor.

There is also a single Molex connector just above the PCI-Express expansion slots which is for use when utilising a quad graphics card configuration, to provide extra power to the PCI-Express lanes.

Taking a look at the rear I/O of the board, we can see six USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 keyboard port, clear CMOS switch with led, IEEE 1394 port, RJ-45 LAN port, two eSATA3 connectors and four USB 3.0 connectors.