Having revealed a teaser image just over a week ago, photos of the ASRock X79 Extreme7 have been revealed.
Keeping in line with the latest Gen3 series, the sleek black on black with silver and gold trims really does look the part. Interestingly there are only three memory DIMMs either side of the socket. Usually there would only be two or four either side. This apparently is so that you can use two RAM modules on channels B and D while still saturating the quad channel memory (Channels A B C D). This is to offer an increased memory capacity while reducing the PCB space taken up by the DIMMs. The memory has a dedicated 4 phase VRM while the CPU appears to have a 16 phase VRM (Could be 12+4).
Featuring a LED debug, power and reset button, a clear CMOS button on the rear I/O plate, two front USB 3.0 headers, five PCI-E 16x slots, two of which are also PCI-E 3.0 compliant and a single legacy PCI slot, supporting DDR3 2400+ OC, SLI and crossfire. It is clear that ASRock are taking the competition head on in the X79 sector.
Some may question the choice of using active cooling on the board, but it is likely to reduce the size of the heatsink needed to provide the cooling for the chipset which in turn will increase the usable PCB area for more features.
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