I haven't used one of these particular boards before, But I do use a ASRock X79 Extreme7 board but it doesn't have these XFast ports you are wanting to know about. I have done some research into these ports and they actually do have a slight performance edge to other standard ports on a Motherboard, I took ages to choose mu motherboard and it can down to Asus Sabertooth or the Extreme7, I love the ASRock boards and are reliable, the extreme boards are great and usually a better price compared to others and have high quality caps and parts. These XFast ports your woundering about are great, Though I haven't used one there are a few reviews out there that compare normal Lan and Xfast Lan, XFast Usb and normal USB, The overall conclusion is that the Xfast come out as faster, not by a huge amount but by a fair amount. ASRock have some of these reviews on their site and Overlockers.net also do as well.