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ASRock 990FX Extreme9 Motherboard Review

With its emergence as the new standard for high-speed portable devices, USB 3.0 performance on a modern motherboard needs to be good to ensure that data transferral bottlenecks aren't created.

We tested USB 3.0 performance using an ADATA SP300 SSD connected to an Icy Box IB-223StU3 USB 3.0 enclosure. ATTO was the benchmark used.

The Etron EJ188H USB 3.0 controller used on the 990FX Extreme9 motherboard is able to offer very good performance, but can't quite match that of the Intel Z77 chipset's ports featured on the Asus P8Z77-V motherboard, at least not until ASRock's XFast USB is activated.

Activating XFast USB's Turbo Mode allows for a healthy speed boost to be achieved by the software's USB protocol manipulations. This is a worthwhile feature that can set the ASRock 990FX Extreme9 apart from other boards without an equivalent implementation.

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5 comments

  1. Great motherboard, they deserve to be recognised more in the enthusiast sector. I love my ASROCK Z77 board

  2. Nice look board and excellent overclocks. I want to upgrade my AMD system this year, but have been waiting on the new products.

  3. It is a little expensive IMO for what you get, Intel boards start way under £100 today.

  4. Great board, sexy layout and well featured. BUT as overclocker i feel 1.5v core is just too much, even for AMD CPUs…. The marginal gains that you get from 600mhz for about 0.3 vcore increase is not worth it. For 5.0ghz, is ok, 1.5 vcore would be understable, but going upper than that is just too away from my comfort zone. I dont know if I can blame the board or a bad chip. Good review !

  5. Warren Puckett

    The Extreme9 990FX will do very well with a 8370E. Does good enough with 9590 (I call the lazy overclockers board combo). Don’t expect it to overclock the 9590 much. It does run all 8 cores at 4.9 ghz all day with turbo turned off (a little better than 4.7/5.0 stock setting for most things). Recognizes the Avexir 2400 speed ram and sets it automatically. Just make sure you have room for a big twin tower air cooler.or a least a 240mm water cooler so you can keep that temps down.
    It does very well with crossfired R9 285s OC to 1100 Mhz (water cooled also).
    If you are going to do something likes need a big case and big power supply too. Like around 1100 watts. 285/380s need a lot more cooling to push them over 1000Mhz