ASRock X79 Extreme11 Pro Reviews

When I first got the ASRock X79 Extreme11, I quite literally laughed when I saw the price. No matter how you look at it, $600 for any motherboard is a tough pill for nearly any user to swallow. I'll admit, that the packaging and physical feel of the board in your hands is very impressive. I was, because of that, quite eager to start playing with it. Once I had powered it on, and left it idling while I did some other stuff, I thought that perhaps it might be better than I was expecting. I, as such, went and made myself a cup of coffee to drink while testing. When I came back, I flipped right out - the noise coming from the board sounded like it was dying!!! I was not sure what ASrock was thinking with that fan at first, but once I had removed the cooler and saw all the chips underneath, I began to understand. This is not a normal board. This is not a practical board, either. What it is, is the highest of the high-end, with no compromises, including noise considerations. Yeah, it's noisy, and yeah, it has to be. You quickly get a different perspective on high performance computing if you have, like me, spent some time in a server room filled with hundreds of racks. The ASrock X79 Extreme11 is very much like one of those server racks, with top-level CPU power, and connectivity that no other board out there offers. Noise is just something you deal with if you want the very best in performance. Watercooling is just not an option with so many chips on the lower portion of the board. That left me with a choice - was the ASRock X79 Extreme11 bad, or was it just misunderstood?

If you want to build the most high-end gaming system in the world, the ASRock X79 Extreme11 is the motherboard you should buy. Thanks to the presence of two PLX PEX8747 switch chips, it allows the installation of four PCI Express 3.0 video cards truly working at x16 speed. On competing motherboards, at least one of the slots will work at x8 speed, if not less. Another highlight of this motherboard is its storage configuration. Since the eight additional SAS/SATA-600 ports are controlled by the same chip, you can set up a massive RAID0 system with up to eight SSDs or hard drives. On competing products with chips that control only two ports, you can only have RAID systems with two SSDs or hard drives. The audio section of this motherboard is also high-end, using a Creative Sound Core3D, which is specifically optimized for audio chat, which is great if you play online games with audio chat.