ASRock A75 Extreme 6 (AMD A75) Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. ASRock A75 Extreme 63. ASRock A75 Extreme 6 (Super High Res Gallery)4. ASRock A75 Extreme 6 (Bios & Overclocking)5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 20117. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit8. Synthetic: 3DMark 119. Synthetic: PCMark 710. Real World: Blu Ray Playback Performance11. Real World: MKV Playback12. Real World: Flash HD Performance13. Real World: Media Encoding14. Data Throughput: SSD Performance15. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.016. Gaming: Just Cause 217. Gaming: Dead Island18. Gaming: Dirt 319. Gaming: Call Of Duty: Black Ops20. Gaming: Far Cry 221. Gaming: Lost Planet 222. Closing Thoughts23. View All Pages

The A75 Extreme 6 motherboard arrives in a distinctive ASRock box featuring a metallic style finish.

The Bundle isn't one of the most comprehensive we have seen in recent months, but it is adequate. It features a back plate, four SATA cables, two manuals, driver CD and a 3.5 mm audio cable.

The board follows a traditional colour scheme, featuring blue and white slots on a dark PCB.

ASRock include three PCI-E x16 slots on this particular board, quite an improvement over the single slot we associate with many boards in this range. When you use a single card is runs at x16. Adding another in a CrossFire configuration forces them to x8 speed. The third slot is only x4. This is pretty much overkill for such a value oriented platform, but we can't complain.

Along the bottom of the board is a HD Audio header, 1394 Firewire connector, HDMI S/PDIF and two USB 2.0 headers. ASrock have included a power and reset switch, as well as a diagnostic readout. To the right is another USB 2.0 connector and the front panel section.

The board has four DDR3 DIMM slots to support up to a total of 32GB. The board natively supports speeds from 800mhz to 1866mhz, although ASRock claim ‘OC' speeds up to 2400mhz.

There are a total of eight SATA ports on the board. Six of them run natively from the A75 chipset at 6Gbps speeds. ASRock have added two extra which run from the ASMedia ASM 1061 controller – these are all SATA 3 ports.

There are 3 and 4 pin headers close to the CPU, ideal for dual fan cooling solutions and chassis fans. There is a 8 pin CPU power connector nearby. There is plenty of room for oversized coolers around the CPU socket.

The I/O plate is fully loaded with a combo PS/2 header above two USB 3.0 ports. Next to that is VGA, DVI and HDMI out. A handy reset CMOS button is here, to rescue the system from unstable situations. There is an eSATA port to the right, shared with the ASM1061 SATA III controller. Above this is a FireWire port and two USB 2.0 ports. Next to the onboard sound panel (RealTek ALC892 audio codec) is a Gigabit LAN port above two more USB 3.0 ports.

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