ASRock’s continued effort to provide higher-end hardware without letting this platform's inherent price premium get out of control is easily illustrated in an X79 Extreme4 that has three extra SATA 6Gb/s ports, eSATA, dual-controller USB 3.0 for internal and I/O ports, and a full set of O/C-friendly features.
Those O/C-friendly features include a Port 80 diagnostics display, an I/O panel CLR_CMOS button, internal power and reset buttons for bench testing, and a eight-phase CPU voltage regulator with oversized cooling.
Front-panel USB 3.0 and one of the added SATA ports are found above-center on the motherboard’s front edge for easy reach of front-panel connector cables. Conversely, the front-panel audio cable is located as far away from any front-panel connectors as it could possibly be, at the rear of the X79 Extreme4’s bottom edge. Remaining ports are designed to coexist with up to three double-slot graphics cards, and ASRock even adds an extra space between the board’s two true x16 PCIe slots for additional graphics cooling.
The provision of a full feature set on a low-cost board is never free of compromise, as the X79 Extreme4 has only four memory slots. Although you'd have to decide right away whether to use 2 GB, 4 GB, or 8 GB modules to achieve quad-channel functionality without any option for future memory expansion, low memory prices make this a reasonable production-cost concession in our minds.

This is the first ASRock Extreme-series board in recent memory not to include the firm’s USB 3.0 front-panel bay adapter. We partly credit case manufacturers with making this part unnecessary, as removing it allows ASRock to further reduce cost and pricing.
We would have liked to see more than four SATA cables, however, even though this is probably enough to serve the budget-enthusiast market.
- Can LGA 2011 Be Made More Affordable?
- ASRock X79 Extreme4
- X79 Extreme4 Firmware
- Asus P9X79
- P9X79 Firmware
- Biostar TPower X79
- TPower X79 Firmware
- ECS X79R-AX Black Deluxe
- X79R-AX Deluxe Firmware
- Intel DX79TO
- DX79TO Firmware
- MSI X79A-GD45 (8D)
- X79A-GD45 (8D) Firmware
- Test Settings And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033
- Benchmark Results: StarCraft II
- Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Overclocking
- Which X79-Based Motherboard Offers More Value?


Since the boards all have vastly superior profit margins, your statement is misleading. Why is everyone too afraid to reveal the truth about motherboard pricing?
A comparison of the time between the power button being pressed and the installed bootloader starting would be very interesting to me. I was thinking it might be easiest to measure this by having no OS on the boot media and measuring the time to the "please insert boot media" message, but I'm sure you can think of other ways of doing it.
I'm also informed that on some boards the boot time varies dramatically dependent on whether any Overclocking is enabled, as compared to the stock settings - that would also be worth knowing.
not anymore, asrock is no longer affiliated with Asus and is owned by Pegatron Corp.
But I'm wondering why AMD continues the ATI brand on the ASrock motherboard? Seems odd. They had everyone replace the CCC as soon as they rebranded and here we are looking at the ATI logo on the ASrock board.
Also, even though there is so little difference when comparing boards using the same architecture, why no BF3 in the gaming section of the review? I thought this was one of the games mentioned in the 2012 goals for Tom's when reviewing gaming performance?
I settled on the ASRock Extreme4-m. I did have to wait for a new BIOS chip to arrive in order to make use of it though. They overnighted one to me last week and I got my system up and running over the weekend. So far so good. I've been quite happy with it now that it's working. I can't say that I've tried the overclocking features.
With the ASRock Extreme4-m the memory slots and CPU 8-pin power connectors are very close to the radiator. I went with the Intel liquid cooler for my build. It's a 120mm fan and radiator. I placed these in a Silverstone FT03 as exhaust from the top of the case. It's important to pick out RAM that doesn't have any crazy fins or spikes on it. I went with some Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 4x4GB that were on the official support list. There is a 4 to 5 mm gap between the RAM and radiator. it is plenty of room for the 8-pin wires to clear without touching the RAM or radiator. It's tight, but it works. I originally was going to buy GSkill RAM that was $20 cheaper, but there's no way the big red fins on those sticks would have fit.
I don't blame them for skipping BF3. Since the most recent video drivers I've been having all sorts of issues with BF3. It's the only game on my machine to display a "Something went wrong" error and crash the entire system. I'd imagine it's hard to benchmark such an unstable game. My Extreme4-m, i7 3820, and Radeon 7950 system has no trouble with Just Cause 2, GTA IV, Crysis, and others, but BF3 has this remarkable capability to come up with the most ridiculous of error messages and strange behavior. That game still has issues.