ASRock X79 Extreme4 Pro Reviews

Readers wanting access to the very best CPU technology need to invest in a Sandy Bridge Extreme CPU and X79 chipset-based motherboard. Setting aside the pros and cons of this platform against the mainstream 6-series boards and upcoming Ivy Bridge-support 7-series, X79 simply isn't cheap. £170 is the minimum one pays for an X79 offering, rising up to £350 for the Kitchen Sink™ model. ASRock plies the low end of the market with the Extreme 4, currently retailing for £175 or so, and it's refreshing to see that genuine thought has been put into the choice of features, layout and overall appeal.

Earlier I had mentioned a feature of the board which would allow it to resume a BIOS update even from a power failure mid-flash. If you read that section of the article you were probably wondering how that went. Well I tested it and the damn thing actually worked. I was almost sure I was going to brick the damned thing. I yanked the power cord out of the back of the PSU during the write stage of the flash. I plugged the power back in and powered on the machine. I got a blank screen, but I did see activity lights on my USB flash drive which is where I was flashing the BIOS from. After a few seconds the system resumed right where it left off like nothing had happened. It’s not every day you get told to do one of "the don’ts" in the list of do’s and don’ts while working on your PC. Yanking the power while doing a BIOS flash is a big "don’t." Well that no longer appears to be the case with the this board at least.

The Extreme4 also performs slightly better, especially in the memory overclock, though that may be down to the updated BIOS version which ASRock had not released for the Extreme4-M at the time of testing. Nevertheless, the Extreme4 would be my choice if I had to choose between these two boards for performance. If you absolutely need a mATX board, the Extreme4-M is not a bad choice. However, you will not be pushing any of the boards too hard on a CPU overclock. And for the noise conscious, you will definitely have to change that default CPU fan setting of a constant 100%.

Unfortunately, as things stand, this cheaper ASRock board isn't trustworthy enough to justify saving money on the platform costs. And we bet there wont be many system integrators picking it up either.