ASRock X79 Extreme9 X79 Motherboard Review

We mentioned that the BIOS on this board is very user friendly for the simple things, but when it comes to overclocking, it seems to be lacking in certain areas and doesn’t feel as “together” as we’d like and hoped for.

A novel feature is the pre-defined EZ OC profiles, which is a fantastic idea. By choose one of these options, it automatically configures the settings relevant including voltages to push your system to your desired profile. Sadly this isn’t as clear cut as that as we found out throughout our testing phase.

We went straight in and loaded the 4.6GHz profile, which should be easily achieved considering our processor can hit 5GHz, and the fact that we’d had it to 4.6GHz on the X79 Extreme4. This would lead you to believe that the bigger brother Extreme9 could effectively do much better with its fantastic power delivery and digital power throughput. Sadly this isn’t the case and 4.6GHz as its pre-defined profile set sent us down a path of crashing, freezing and BSODs.

We then had to ramp the voltages up a bit more to try and gain some kind of stability, but even going to 1.45V yielded the same results. It was finally when we got to 1.5V and through a combination of other voltage tweaks including the PLL voltage, that we managed some form of stability and we continued to stress the system to make sure stability was at 100%.

Not being beaten there, we decided to try the profiles again, and though stability was an issue, we had an inkling that the 46x multiplier may just be trying to cause trouble, so we bumped up to the 4.8GHz profile and things worked partially. Just a bit more tinkering with voltages to get 100% stability was all that we needed to follow.

We had to tweak the voltage settings and raise the Vcore to get 100% stability, but were quite proud that we managed to hit 4.8GHz under 1.48V. This was all done through a 100 x 48 multiplier giving us a final speed of 4.8GHz. Whilst the voltage is a bit high for some consumers under air cooling, we were using our trusty Corsair H80, which allowed for slightly lower temperatures and with the right cooling, an overclock of this calibre can easily be run 24/7.

We did attempt to drop the multiplier and raise the bus speed, but no real benefit was seen by doing things in this matter so we stuck with our original speed of 4.8GHz by use of the multiplier instead, which is especially handy for users upgrading from P67/Z68 Sandy Bridec based systems as this simply follows suit.