ASRock Z77 Extreme9 Pro Reviews

I have to say that ASRock Z77 Extreme9 mainboard left a very good impression. In fact, we didn’t have any serious problems with it, neither in nominal mode, nor during CPU and memory overclocking. Of course, there are a few things that could be improved, but they are totally outweighed by the indisputable advantages and unique features the board boasts. This is, actually, one of the reasons why our original intention to compare ASRock and Gigabyte mainboards has finally arrived to a dead end. These two mainboards have a lot in common and at the same time are very different. Each board has its own advantages and its own specific shortcomings, however the advantages are not dramatic enough and the shortcomings are not critical enough to allow us to award the winning title to one of these products. Both of them seem to be priced in the same range, but the latter turned out arguable. We have already pointed out many times in our reviews that ASRock mainboards are usually priced lower than other similar products, which can make them a more attractive purchase. To our sincere surprise, ASRock Z77 Extreme9 turned out significantly more expensive than Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3. For example, the popular Newegg.com web-site offers Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3 for $280, which is already quite a lot for an Intel Z77 Express based mainboard, but can still be explained by extensive functionality and all the extras this board has to offer. At the same time they offer ASRock Z77 Extreme9 for as much as $350! Taking into account that the two boards have a pretty equal score of highs and lows, this serious price difference makes ASRock’s marketing success pretty vague.

After spending a week with the ASRock Z77 Extreme9, I have mixed feelings about it, when compared to other Z77 boards on the market. Thanks to a PLX PCI-Express bridge chip, the board enables the use of additional PCI-Express slots, a great feature for users who need support for three or more video cards. However, the oversight there is that the board claims to support quad-card SLI, but doesn't include a bridge to be able to do so, and the claims of five PCIe 3.0 slots are questionable to me. I found several PCI-Express 2.0 switch chips on the board, which simply aren't capable of PCIe 3.0 connectivity. I'm working on getting a bunch of PCI-Express 3.0 graphics cards, to further investigate this issue, but with my sample being and "Engineering Sample", this issue should be rectified with retail versions. Power consumption was pretty good, and in general 3D performance was good too, but general computing performance seems to be on the low side. Honestly this wasn't something that appeared very obvious under normal usage for me, so while it sounds to be a big thing, it really isn't. Storage performance over all interfaces was very good, and truly, the biggest benefit of the ASRock Extreme9 just isn't shown in any type of testing, unless you populate all the PCIe slots.

The ASRock Z77 Extreme9 is targeted to the sophisticated enthusiast, who wants to build a system based on an “Ivy Bridge” CPU with three or four video cards in SLI or CrossFireX mode and want all video cards to have the highest bandwidth with the CPU possible, i.e., accessed using the PCI Express 3.0 bandwidth, not the 2.0, and using at least x8 speed. This is possible thanks to the use of the high-end PLX8747 switch chip. In addition, this motherboard is targeted to the user who understands the importance of the PEX8608 chip, another switch circuit from PLX. On motherboards with too many PCI Express devices without a switch chip, you need to manually disable devices on the motherboard setup in order to achieve full performance on devices connected to the USB 3.0 and SATA-600 ports when transferring files at the same time. This is especially important on this motherboard, as it has eight additional USB 3.0 ports, for a total of 12.