After a very, very long wait, ASRock has finally brought its Z87 Extreme11/ac motherboard to the market. We've seen the motherboard before, and one thing that comes to mind about the board is that it truly deserves the name 'Extreme.'
The board is an E-ATX that features an extreme number of connectivity options -- namely, a grand total of 22 SATA/SAS ports, which creep up to over half the height of the board. Oh, and just because this isn't enough (because why would it be?) ASRock has also fitted the board with two mSATA ports. Note though, that only six of the 22 SATA ports are controlled by the Z87 chipset. The remainder is controlled by an LSI SAS 3008 controller paired with a 3X24R expander.
Furthermore, the motherboard features a 12-phase VRM circuit, space for up to four DDR3 memory modules, four PCIe x16 slots (which when all populated dip down to eight lanes each), as well as numerous USB 2.0 and 3.0 headers.
The rear I/O is handled by a pair of USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, DisplayPort connectivity as well as an HDMI port, dual Gigabit Ethernet, dual Thunderbolt ports, 7.1 HD audio ports (driven by the Purity Sound technology with a 115 dB SNR, TOSLINK audio out, and of course an old-school PS/2 connector. Oh, and the motherboard also has support for 802.11ac WiFi as well as Bluetooth 4.0.
The motherboard should be hitting shelves any moment now, and it's price tag is expected to be about $600, making it more expensive than the CPU it'll be cradling, under pretty much all circumstances.
