ASRock X79 Extreme6 GB Review

The ASRock Extreme6 X79 LGA2011 motherboard offers the usual high end refinements but also throws in a sound expansion card. How well does it stack up against the competition?

Product on Review : X79 Extreme6
Manufacturer and Sponsor : ASRock

Street Price: £214.44 inc. VAT (GBP)

When the ASRock Extreme series of motherboards first hit the stores, most enthusiasts were forced to sit up and pay attention. Not because of the black and gold theme but because of the fantastic use of components and board layout making the ASRock mainboards very powerful yet user friendly. This great combination has allowed novice overclockers to maximise their components potential while they can also boast to having one of the best looking motherboards around.

We at Vortez have held the Extreme family in high regard. Indeed, there mainboards and our awards have a common theme – Gold which is an award we don’t give out too easily. Our previous X79 ASRock board is still high up in the performance charts despite it also being the smallest X79 mainboard we have reviewed thus far. The diminutive mATX motherboard impressed us throughout the review and held it’s own against motherboards costing twice as much.

So then today we take a look at the mid-high end Extreme6 motherboard. this product comes in two guises, GB and non-GB. Today we will be reviewing the GB ‘GameBlaster’ version which as the title suggests comes complete with the GameBlaster Sound card. We have seen add-on sound cards bundled before, particularly with ultra high end boards so for the ASRock to include this in what is there mid-high end offering is something of a coup. With three SLI/Crossfire PCIe slots and 8xDIMM ports it is clear the Extreme6 means business so without further delay let’s explore the specification of todays review sample.

ASRock Inc. is established in 2002, specialized in the field of motherboards. ASRock strives to build up its own brand. With the 3C design concept, “Creativity, Consideration, Cost-effectiveness”, the company explores the limit of motherboards manufacturing while paying attention on the eco issue at the same time, developing products with the consideration of eco-friendly concept.

ASRock has been growing fast and become world third largest motherboard brand with headquarter in Taipei, Taiwan and branches in Europe and the USA. The young and vibrant company targets from mainstream to enthusiast MB segments for different kinds of users, owning reputation around the world market with its reliability and proficiency.

Technical Specification

CPU
– Supports Intel® Core™ i7 processor family for the LGA 2011 Socket
– Digi Power Design
– 12 + 2 Power Phase Design
– Supports Intel® Turbo Boost 2.0 Technology
– Supports Hyper-Threading Technology
– Supports Untied Overclocking Technology

Chipset
– Intel® X79

Memory
– Quad Channel DDR3 memory technology
– 8 x DDR3 DIMM slots
– Supports DDR3 2400+(OC)/2133(OC)/1866(OC)/1600/1333/1066 non-ECC, un-buffered memory
– Supports DDR3 ECC, un-buffered memory with Intel® Workstation 1S Xeon processors E5 16xx/26xx/46xx series in socket LGA 2011
– Max. capacity of system memory: 64GB*
– Supports Intel® Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) 1.3 / 1.2
*Due to the operating system limitation, the actual memory size may be less than 4GB for the reservation for system usage under Windows® 32-bit OS. For Windows® 64-bit OS with 64-bit CPU, there is no such limitation.

BIOS
– 64Mb AMI UEFI Legal BIOS with GUI support
– Supports “Plug and Play”
– ACPI 1.1 Compliance Wake Up Events
– Supports jumperfree
– SMBIOS 2.3.1 Support
– CPU, VCCSA, DRAM, VTT, CPU PLL, PCH1.1V, PCH1.5V Voltage Multi-adjustment
Audio, Video and Networking

Audio
ASRock Game Blaster Audio
– Supported by the bundled ASRock Game Blaster
– Creative Sound Core3D quad-core sound and voice processor
– Supports THX TruStudio™ PRO
– Supports CrystalVoice
– Supports EAX1.0 to EAX5.0Onboard Audio
– 7.1 CH HD Audio with Content Protection (Realtek ALC898 Audio Codec)
– Premium Blu-ray audio support
– Supports THX TruStudio™

LAN
– PCIE x1 Gigabit LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s
– Broadcom BCM57781
– Supports Wake-On-LAN
– Supports Energy Efficient Ethernet 802.3az
– Supports Dual LAN with Teaming function with the bundled ASRock Game Blaster
– Supports PXE
Expansion / Connectivity

Slots
– 3 x PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots (PCIE1 @ x16 mode; PCIE3 @ x16 mode; PCIE4 @ x8 mode)
– 1 x PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot
– 2 x PCI slots
– Supports AMD Quad CrossFireX™ , 3-Way CrossFireX™ and CrossFireX™
– Supports NVIDIA® Quad SLI™ , 3-Way SLI™ and SLI™

SATA3
– 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by Intel® X79, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and Intel® Rapid Storage 3.0), NCQ, AHCI and “Hot Plug” functions
– 3 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by ASMedia ASM1061, support NCQ, AHCI and “Hot Plug” functions

USB 3.0
– 4 x Rear USB 3.0 ports by TI, support USB 1.0/2.0/3.0 up to 5Gb/s
– 1 x Front USB 3.0 header (supports 2 USB 3.0 ports) by ASMedia ASM1042, supports USB 1.0/2.0/3.0 up to 5Gb/s

Connector
– 4 x SATA2 3.0 Gb/s connectors, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and Intel® Rapid Storage 3.0), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions
– 5 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors
– 1 x IR header
– 1 x CIR header
– 1 x COM port header
– 1 x HDMI_SPDIF header
– 1 x IEEE 1394 header
– 1 x Power LED header
– CPU/Chassis/Power/SB FAN connector
– 24 pin ATX power connector
– 8 pin 12V power connector
– SLI/XFire power connector
– 3 x USB 2.0 headers (support 6 USB 2.0 ports)
– 1 x USB 3.0 header (supports 2 USB 3.0 ports)
– 1 x Dr. Debug with LED

Rear Panel I/O
– 1 x PS/2 Mouse Port
– 1 x PS/2 Keyboard Port
– 1 x Coaxial SPDIF Out Port
– 1 x Optical SPDIF Out Port
– 4 x Ready-to-Use USB 2.0 Ports
– 1 x eSATA3 Connector
– 4 x Ready-to-Use USB 3.0 Ports
– 1 x RJ-45 LAN Port with LED (ACT/LINK LED and SPEED LED)
– 1 x IEEE 1394 Port
– 1 x Clear CMOS Switch with LED
– HD Audio Jack: Side Speaker / Rear Speaker / Central / Bass / Line in / Front Speaker / Microphone
Other Features / Miscellaneous

Unique Feature
– ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility (AXTU)
– ASRock Instant Boot
– ASRock Instant Flash
– ASRock APP Charger
– ASRock SmartView
– ASRock XFast USB
– ASRock XFast LAN
– ASRock XFast RAM
– ASRock X-FAN
– ASRock Crashless BIOS
– Hybrid Booster:
– CPU Frequency Stepless Control
– ASRock U-COP
– Boot Failure Guard (B.F.G.)
– Good Night LED

Smart Switch
– 1 x Power Switch with LED
– 1 x Reset Switch with LED
– 1 x Clear CMOS Switch with LED

Support CD
– Drivers, Utilities, AntiVirus Software (Trial Version), CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 Trial, ASRock Software Suite (ASRock MAGIX Multimedia Suite – OEM)
Accessories
– 1 x ASRock SLI_Bridge_2S Card
– 1 x ASRock 3-Way SLI-2S1S Bridge Card
– 1 x ASRock Game Blaster
– Quick Installation Guide, Support CD, I/O Shield
– 5 x SATA Data Cables
– 1 x Front USB 3.0 Panel
– 4 x HDD Screws
– 6 x Chassis Screws
– 1 x Rear USB 3.0 Bracket

Hardware Monitor
– CPU Temperature Sensing
– Chassis Temperature Sensing
– CPU/Chassis/Power/SB Fan Tachometer
– CPU/Chassis Quiet Fan (Allow Chassis Fan Speed Auto-Adjust by CPU Temperature)
– CPU/Chassis/SB Fan Multi-Speed Control
– Voltage Monitoring: +12V, +5V, +3.3V, CPU Vcore

Form Factor
– ATX Form Factor: 12.0-in x 9.6-in, 30.5 cm x 24.4 cm
– Premium Gold Capacitor design (100% Japan-made high-quality Conductive Polymer Capacitors)

OS
– Microsoft® Windows® 7 / 7 64-bit / Vista™ / Vista™ 64-bit / XP / XP 64-bit compliant
Certifications – FCC, CE, WHQL
– ErP/EuP Ready (ErP/EuP ready power supply is required)

Features

ASRock Game Blaster
Unleash Your Maximum Gaming Power

Supporting Creative Sound Core3D 7.1 CH HD audio and Broadcom gigabit lan via the bundled ASRock Game Blaster, ASRock motherboard could give the extreme value for serious gamers!

Creative Sound Core3D Audio
•7.1 CH HD Audio, Sample Rate : 192KHz / 24-Bit
• THX TruStudio PRO
• CrystalVoice
• Scout Mode
• EAX1.0 to EAX5.0
• Premium Headset Amplifier (PHA)
• Full Blu-ray Profile 2.0 Audio Decoder Support

XFast 555 Technology : XFast RAM / XFast LAN / XFast USB

Digi Power
By adopting digital pulse-width modulation (PWM), the ASRock motherboard can provide CPU Vcore voltage more efficiently and smoothly. Compared to analog PWM, digital PWM can optimize the CPU power solution and provide a proper and stable Vcore for the processor.

12+2 Power Phase
The 12+2 Power Phase features sturdy components and completely smooth power delivery to the CPU. It offers unmatched overclocking capability and enhanced performance with the lowest temperatures for PC gaming enthusiasts.

Premium Gold Caps
Premium Gold Caps are luxury capacitors. These 100% Japan-made solid capacitors are sleek, high gloss caps with a premium gold coating representing long life and stable performance.

8 x DDR3 2400+ DIMM Supports Quad Channel Memory
The ASRock motherboard has 8 DIMM slots for Quad-Channel memory, supporting for 2400+(OC) MHz DDR3 memory!

Broadcom Dual LAN

Dual LAN allows two single connections to act as one single connection for twice the transmission bandwidth, making data transmission more effective.

Next-Gen PCI-E 3.0 Support
The ASRock motherboards support the Next-Gen PCI-E 3.0! PCI Express 3.0 can maximize the bandwidth for the next-gen PCI Express 3.0 VGA cards, provide ultimate graphics performance.

Get PCI-E 3.0 Benefits
• Higher bit rate – 8.0GT/s
• Higher bandwidth per lane – 1GB/s
• Higher efficiency – 98.5% encoding efficiency
• 100% backward compatible with previous PCI-E 2.0 / 1.0 standard

X-FAN
Greater air flow, faster heat dissipation! ASRock X-FAN allows the motherboard to breathe smoothly. It will be automatically activated only when the system rises to a certain temperature under heavy-loading. Normally, ASRock X-FAN will remain deactivated to give users the quietest computing experience.

Graphical UEFI – The Revolutionary BIOS Interface
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a revolutionary BIOS utility which offers tweak-friendly options in an advanced viewing interface. Compared with traditional BIOS design, the latest UEFI utility provides lots improved functions. The major features of UEFI include:
1. Graphical Visual Experience – UEFI provides an improved visual interface with colorful icons and makes your computing environment more versatile to replace the traditional dull BIOS page.
2. Mouse Enabling – Besides keyboard control, you can freely use mouse to select your ideal settings in UEFI as well.
3. Supports 3TB bootable HDD – UEFI breaks the limitations of 2TB bootable HDD on traditional BIOS. With UEFI, you can enjoy 3TB bootable HDD size.*

Crashless BIOS
ASRock Crashless BIOS allows users to update their BIOS without fear of failing. If power loss occurs during the BIOS update process, ASRock Crashless BIOS will automatically finish the BIOS update procedure after regaining power. Please note that BIOS files need to be placed in the root directory of your USB disk. Only USB 2.0 ports support this feature.[/quote

Packaging & Accessories

Box Front

The front of the box is near identical to the packaging of most other Extreme class motherboards from ASRock. The gun-metal grey background looks very stylish and worlds apart from some of the gaudy packaging designs we have seen in the past. The base of the front packaging displays the main product features including PCIe 3.0, Windows 7 compatibility, Intel Core i7 (SB-E) support, X-FAST RAM and of course the Game Blaster expansion card.

Box Rear

The rear of the packaging sports a technical layout of the mainboard displaying the on-board features. Below this are in-depth descriptions of the showcase features of the Extreme6.

Accessories

The accessory list is very good with 4 SATA cables, E-SATA cable, TRI SLI bridge, External USB 3.0 bracket, I/O shield, two instruction manuals and the driver/utility CD.

Gameblaster Packaging

The Game Blaster is packaging separately and like the mainboard itself is very well packaged.

Game Blaster

Here we get a first look at the Game Blaster. The expansion card features no only sound expansion but also has an ethernet port powered by the Broadcom chipset. For your audio expansion, the usual 3.5mm sockets (gold plated) are joined by S/PDIF and optical ports. We will look a little closer at this card later in the review but first impression are very good.

Let’s move on to the motherboard…

Mainboard

Motherboard Front

Like all of the extreme range, the Extreme6 features a black PCB with a smattering of gold and silver. The PCB, while silk screened black looks dark brown due to the copper traces of the motherboard shining though which is a shame. The Gold comes courtesy of the solid caps with the silver, or rather gun-metal grey provided by the gorgeous looking heatsinks. The board is will laid out with all the main connectors found around the leading edges save for the GPU MOLEX power port which is in an odd position, right above the uppermost PCIe socket.

Motherboard rear

Under extreme lighting conditions you can see just how brown the mainboard looks. Under normal lighting though it looks much darker and you will barely notice once the board is hidden away inside a PC case. Regardless, I would like to see a matt black silk screen procedure which will hide the copper tracing much better and give a deeper black. Aesthetics aside, the rear of the motherboard features a couple of chokes with 4 MOSFETS, testament to the cramped VRM found above the CPU socket. Thankfully these do not appear to interfere with CPU cooler backplates.

CPU Socket

The CPU socket is rather cramped too due to the solid caps. While again these do not interfere with the fitment of CPU coolers, extreme coolers prefer a clutter free area for insulation purposes. The Tantalum core capacitors do add a touch of class to the socket area and while the gold caps look the business, I would prefer to have seen a cleaner CPU socket area.

PCI Area

From top to bottom we have: PCIe 3.0 x16, PCIe x1, PCI, PCIe 3.0 x16, PCI, PCIex8. In Crossfire or SLI configuration, the uppermost slots will remain in 16x mode however adding a further GPU will reduce the amount of lanes by half to 8. IF you intend on using hte Game Blaster card, you will have to sacrifice a PCIe slot regardless unless you intend on running watercooled graphics cards that only take up one slot of space.

Serial ATA

The Extreme 6 features both SATA 6Gb/s and SATA 2 ports courtesy of the X79 chipset and a separate chipset from ASMEDIA in a 5+4 configuration, the grey ports being SATA 6Gb/s.

Power ports

Motherboard power comes courtesy of a 24pin ATX socket and a further 8pin EPS12v socket which is hidden out of sight behind the uppermost heatsink. Both ports are on the leading edges though so cable tidying should be a cinch with this mainboard.

On-board control

The board can be powered and reset by the use of onboard buttons. Sadly these are not illuminated which was a shame but they work perfectly nonetheless. There is also a diagnostic ‘debug’ LED available which glows red on startup until it has gone through the booting process and all is well. After which it too extinguishes.

Extra GPU Power

One oddity with the motherboard is the inclusion of a MOLEX power socket. This provides extra juice to the GPUs when used in SLI/Crossfire. Strangely the motherboard seemed unsure of whether this was necessary or not but it’s a welcome addition regardless. I only wish ASRock had chosen a better position as where it currently sits could prove untidy to have a cable stretching agross the backplate of a GPU.

I/O Shield

The I/O area of the motherboard is very well laid out. LEft to right we have PS2 keyboard and mouse sockets, a clear CMOS button, S/PDIF and optical out, 4xUSB 3.0 ports, LAN RJ45 port, USB 2.0 port, 2 red USB 2.0 ports, Firewire, eSATA ports and 6×3.5mm audio ports. The amount of USB ports can be expanded further with the inclusion of a USB bracket.

Closer Look

Gameblaster Packaging

Game Blaster Internals

Stripping away the shielding of the Game Blaster care we find that the sound is taken care of by Creative judging by the small EMI shield on top of the chip.

On-Board chips

The card is indeed powered by Creative with the Creative Sound Core3D (CA0132-4AN) chip found beneath the shield. We also see that the Ethernet port is powered by Broadcom’s NetLink twelfth-generation 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet LAN controller BCM57781 chip.

PCIe Firewire

The VT6315N chip is an integrated controller with PCI-Express x1 which integrates IEEE 1394a 2000 OHCI link layer controller.

Super IO

The NCT6776D is a member of Nuvoton’s Super I/O product line. The NCT6776D monitors several critical parameters in PC hardware, including power supply voltages, fan speeds and temperatures. In terms of temperature monitoring, the NCT6776D adopts the Current Mode (dual current source) and thermistor sensor approach. The NCT6776D also supports the Smart Fan control system, including “SMART FAN TM I “and “SMART FAN TM IV”, which makes the system more stable and user-friendly.

ASMEDIA USB Controller

The ASMedia ASM1042 is the Universal Serial Bus 3.0 extended host controller, complies with Intel’s eXtensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI). ASM1042 is highly integrated with ASMedia PCI Express, SuperSpeed USB3.0, High Speed USB2.0 self-design PHYs, applied for SuperSpeed USB host PC system through PCI Express Bus Interface

On-Board Sound

If you don’t intend to use the Game Blaster and Creative Audio then fear not because On-board sound is also very good and is provided by Realtek’s ALC898 Codec.

Heatsinks

Both heatsinks of the ASRock Extreme6 are independent of one another. Both heatsinks are coated aluminium with fancy shields attached with screws. The X79 chipset cooler uses paste as the TIM whereas the MOSFET cooler used thermal tape. Both heatsinks made good contact with their respective components.

Voltage Regulation

The main VRM is made up of a 12+2 design. Tantalum core capacitors are joined by MOSFETs and chokes of the highest quality so while this is not the most advanced VRM we have seen on an X79 motherboard, no expense has been spared on the components used. A Separate CHiL controller see to the regulation adjustments allowing for a range of voltages to be set in the UEFI BIOS.

X79 Chipset

Finally, we reach the beating heart of the ASRock X79 Extreme6 motherboard, the X79 chipset. We have covered this fine piece of Intel technology in prior reviews so we won’t cover old ground here but suffice to say, the X79 chipset is the choice of both overclockers and serious enthusiasts the world over – fitting for a motherboard with Extreme in it’s product title.

Test Setup

When we decided to put the test bench together for X79 we wanted a system that would not only perform well but also last the test of time given that X58 has been around for some 3 years now so we saw no reason to believe that its successor, X79 would not be able to do the same.

Some of the components for our test bench were kindly donated by CORSAIR who provided the majority of components without whom we would not have been able to bring you this review so a big thanks to them. Thanks also go to MSI who donated their NVIDIA GTX560Ti.

Motherboards on test:

ASRock Extreme6 GB

GIGABYTE X79-UD3
MSI X79 Big Bang XPower II
ASRock X79 Extreme4-M
GIGABYTE X79-UD5
MSI X79A-GD65(8 D)

X79 Test Setup
CPU: Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GTX560Ti
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 1866MHz 9-10-9-27
Power Supply – Corsair TX750M 750W
Hard Drive – Hitachi SATA II 250GB
Samsung F3 1TB
Cooler – Corsair H100

Benchmarks

Cinebench 11.5 – CPU Score
x264 HD 4.0 – 1st and 2nd pass encoding
SiSoftware SANDRA 2011 – CPU benchmarks
AIDA64 – CPU benchmarks
CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 – Convert 145MB MP4 to avi
PCMark 7 – System Benchmark
3DMark 11 – Performance and Extreme preset Overall and Physics Score
Games – Crysis 2, DiRT3, Metro 2033

Other Software
Core Temp 0.99.5
LinX stress Test
CPUID HWMonitor

Overclocking

In stock format with the BIOS defaults loaded, the Extreme6 is like all of the other motherboards we have tested thus far, down clocking the processor to 1.2GHz and using just 0.824vcore. Using Turbo boost technology, the CPU clockspeed raises to 3.6GHz, 300MHz over the stock clockspeed of 3.3GHz.

Memory clockspeed of our Corsair Vengeance was correctly set using the XMP profile to 1866MHz 9-10-9-27 @1.5v.

Using the settings we used for the Extreme4-M motherboard we managed to hit the golden 5GHz mark. While this clockspeed was stable, a quick run on Prime95 saw the CPU temps raise to uncomfortably high levels of 90c so we had to drop the clockspeed back a little by 100MHz to 4.9 which allowed us to also lower the voltages thereby lowering CPU temperatures down to a more reasonable 82c max. I have no qualms in saying that clockspeeds above 5GHz would be attainable with better cooling however, our Corsair H100, coupled with mid-summer ambient temps simply couldn’t keep temperatures down enough and as we didn’t wish to send our 3630X to an early grave, we ran the suite of benchmark tests at 4.9GHz.

Power Consumption

To test for power consumption we use the same basic components for each motherboard on test. Readings are then taken from the wall both in stock (Optimised defaults loaded) and maximum overclocked (Voltages may vary).

Under idle conditions the ASRock Extreme6 performed in the middle of the pack, neither impressing nor disappointing.

Under 100% load using Prime95, the ASRock Extreme6 drew the most power under overclocked conditions however it has to be said that the vDroop was minimal upon setting the level to 1 in the BIOS. Stock clockspeed consumption faired better though, splitting the pack right down the middle.

Sisoft Sandra 2012

SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but I believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering – CPU and memory tests.

AIDA64

This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example — with HyperThreading disabled — the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.

x264 HD V4.0

Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What’s x264, you ask? It’s more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. I think it’s ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process, and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently. The test uses multiple cores efficiently to give a good representation of real world performance.

Cinebench 11.5

Based on the MAXON animation software CINEMA 4D, Cinebench is a test suite that uses the system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene. This makes it an excellent benchmark to measure CPU and motherboard performances.

CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. This test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

Futuremark 3DMark 11

Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

Futuremark PCMark 7

PCMark 7 is a tool provided by FutureMark that tests the PCs ability in general office and everyday use. It produces a number that reflects the all-round performance of the PC and is useful to compare between differing setups. For more information, visit the FutureMark website.

Gaming Benchmarks

Crysis 2
Crytek took an internet beating from its loyal fans due to the fact that they pandered to the console masses and dumbed down the graphics to DirectX 9. Fortunately, fans of the PC version of Crysis managed to force Cryteks hand and they have since developed a DX11 patch and have also enhanced the textures with added tesselation. It is for this reason that we have decided to include it in our suite of benchmarks.

DiRT3
As players race to elevate their global standing, DiRT 3 is back delivering mud, sweat and gears world over: from the intense weather-beaten rally stages of Europe, Africa and the US, to executing performance driving showcases and career challenges where car control is pushed to spectacular limits.

Conclusion

The ASRock Extreme6 GB poses an interesting proposition in that it is designed as a mid-range motherboard (the extreme 7 an 9 being higher specified) yet including the Game Blaster add-on card enhances the motherboards appeal. Sadly the cost also increases. At £230 it is not the most expensive motherboard we have come across on the X79 platform and it does weigh in some £50 cheaper than the range topping Extreme9 and only £15 more than the Extreme 7. Would I chose it over the Extreme 7? Yes and here’s why:

The Extreme6 GB is a motherboard that pretty much has everything a mainstream user could want. First off, it looks great. Save for the questionable silk screening process of the PCB, the gold caps married up to the gun metal grey heatsinks is joy to behold. The only issue you might have is filling it with equally visually stunning components. All too often though we see that beauty is only skin deep. I am happy to report that this is not the case with the Extreme6. From the component used to the UEFI BIOS, each and every section of this mainboard is very well thought out. The layout of the motherboard is great aside from the GPU power connector. There are plenty of SATA ports, 8 DIMM slots (2 more than the Extreme7) and as long as you don’t intend on running three GPU’s with the Game Blaster sound card too you shouldn’t have any spacing issues to contend with.

I’ve Purposely left discussion of the Game Blaster expansion card until the conclusion as it is the one thing that separates this board from being a good package, to a great package. While on-board Realtek ALC898 is perfectly adequate for most scenarios, gamers crave better and this appears to be the ethos of the Extreme6. Using the Game Blaster will allow both LAN ports to be used simultaneously but the main selling point is the Creative Core3D 7.1 HD audio which brings your gaming experience to life. I won’t profess that it can compete with the features of the high end ASUS Xonar cards because quite frankly it can’t but for gaming you will be hard pushed to tell the difference between the two. I only hope driver refreshes are forthcoming as this was always Creative’s downfall. Regardless, adding in a quality sound card certainly pours value into the overall package and certainly offers the gamer a complete, quality package rather than buying a motherboard and a separate sound card at a later date. Of course, the sound card is as aesthetically pleasing as the mainboard having the same design as the motherboard heatsinks. The only drawback being you will be limited to two available PCIe slots for your graphics cards. This however may not be such a bad thing as most gamers are unlikely to use TRI-SLI or CrossfireX in a 3 card configuration – those that do will no doubt have the money to pay for a flagship XL-ATX mainboard able to accommodate such a monster GPU setup.

So if you are looking for a very capable, overclocking friendly, feature packed mid-high end gaming foundation, the ASRock Extreme6 GB ticks all the boxes and is therefore deserving of our Vortez Gold award.

Pros:
+ Good value
+ Great looks
+ Intuitive BIOS
+ 3-way SLI/Crossfire
+ Quad Channel Memory
+ Game Blaster Expansion Card

Cons:
– Questionable ‘brown’ PCB under certain lighting conditions
– Poor placement of GPU MOLEX power