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The ASRock Z68 Extreme 4 is an attractively designed board, featuring large metallic style heatsinks to help with cooling performance.
While the colour scheme is rather subdued, the board layout is very strong with offering good positioning on connectivity. The CPU socket is clear from obstruction, meaning that fitting oversized CPU coolers such as the Noctua NH D14 proves painfree. We actually fitted a D14 cooler for this review.
There are two PCI, two PCI E 1x and three PCI-E 16x slots on this board. The top two PCI-E slots will run at 16x if only one card is fitted. If you use two cards, then they drop to 8x speed. If you want 3 way crossfire, then the last card drops to 4x.
Many people immediately wince when they see a two card setup drop to 8x, but in reality there is very little difference in the real world. We have looked at this before and the performance hit, is minimal, if any, right now. That said, if you want to run graphics in a three way configuration , then the 4x bandwidth drop will prove a problem. X58, or the upcoming X79 will prove a better alternative if this is a high priority on your list.
ASrock also recommend that you use the 4 pin Molex connector when running more than a 200watt card demand in CF or SLI, seen in the image above right. We saw no difference with it connected (with high end CFx and SLI builds), but in some situations it might help with stability.
Along the bottom of the board are connectors for front panel audio, COM1, floppy drive, Infrared, 1394 FireWire, three USB 2.0 headers (dark blue), USB 3.0 header (lighter blue) and the usual chassis headers. Above this are instant power on, reset buttons and a diagnostic readout to help deal with potential issues.
This board is supplied with eight SATA ports, the SATA 2 are blue and the SATA 3 (6Gbps) are white. The onboard controller handles the blue SATA connectors and the nearest SATA 3 ports. The two ports far right are controlled by the Marvell SE9120 controller (they are marked M1 and M2).
The board has plenty of fan headers positioned on all corners and there is a main 24 pin power connector, next to the four ram slots. It supports 1066/1333/1600/1866/2133mhz DDR3 memory with a dual channel configuration up to 32GB total.
Next to the CPU socket is an 8 pin power connector with both 3 and 4 pin fan headers close by. The Extreme 4 heatsinks are large, but don't interfere with cooler fitting along any of the axis.
Connectivity is strong with PS/2 keyboard support, two USB 2.0 ports, DVI-D, VGA, Displayport and HDMI out. A handy reset CMOS button is also included. Two more USB 2.0 ports are next to a 1394 Firewire port and below that there is an eSATA port. Two USB 3.0 ports are set to the right, under a Broadcom BCM57781 chip. 7.1 audio is supported via the Realtek ALC892 chip with additional THX TruStudio PRO capabilities.
Thats a great product, ive read a few reviews lately on various sites and they seem to score well. Arent they owned by ASUS ?
I haven’t even got my P67 changed yet to B3 revision. might just sell it on ebay and buy one of these.
The B3 revision was overhyped. there was no big deal about the sata problems anyway. just a lot of nonsense. Intel lost a billion over basically very little.
The SSD caching technology is a great idea, but I think it might end up in no mans land.
why? well the people who are educated enough to know about it, will already have an SSD as a boot drive. a mechanical drive for storage. therefore useless.
Those people who have a simple system with say a 500GB HD and nothing else, they wont rush out to get an SSD to take their system apart to set it up for caching. Its not that easy to do all that, and joe public wont even understand the differences. its a mid way no mans land approach imo. cool idea mind you.
Come on, why not spend some time fixing teh bandwidth issues with two cards? rather than spend such a long time on bloody SSD caching 10 people will use.
Its too close to p67, its confusing people. I think they are trying to lose the P67 flawed concerns, I know people who arent buying Intel atm, even though P67 is fixed and wouldnt even affect 99% of people buying one.
How much is it?
Its only marginally more expensive that P67, but I wonder if its cause of that sh**ty lucid nonsense they put on it. who the f*** wants that? eh?
Im not interested in these products. Its such a dumb release IMHO.
How often do ASRock update their bios. their website is slow as all hell for me to find out. I heard it was terrible.
I like the CPU slot area, its free of crap. really helps with some fitting.s I just opted for a D14 last month. No interest in Z68 for the time being. I use a 128GB SSD already. seems about the only thing worth moving for. Lucid? seriously?
Shame you didnt use the 2500k. no one uses it anymore for reviews. you used it for the verification too ! im gutted 🙁
this can take 8GB DDR3 modules? are they even out yet?
I wouldnt touch ASROCK with a 50 foot stick. I bought a board from them last year and it died installing windows. POS.
I think ASROCK should make one with a dedicated sound card like ASUS, realtek onboard is crap.
long time reader, but I hate this recapthca nonsense so I never post.
If this goes through, can I make a request? Can you include temperature results from your review? placing diodes on the heatsinks? I really would like to know how hot the heatsinks get. no one does this and its so impotrant.
ASRock will have a tough time in the UK. ASUS really dominate. and @Fred, no they arent a part of ASUS
Umm, not to be disrespectful, but isn’t the point of virtu that it will save you power on i mode, though GPUs these days tend to have very capable power-scaling capabilities – shouldn’t you have looked into the this?
@Tommyboy and @Victor, Lucid Virtue is actually an excellent feature when setup in discrete mode (screen connected to the GC instead of on the motherboard towards the Intel HD Graphics on the CPU) : whenever I need to transcode a video from one format to another, Virtue will automatically switch processes to the CPU’s GPU instead of the graphics card, the later being much MUCH more efficient than any Graphic cards on the market (about 40% gain). A must have for any serious video transcoding job. The only thing is that not many software vendors had the time to implement routines specifically coded with Intel’s HD “libraries” in mind – Media Espresso deos this, but I don’t know about others like Adobe or Autodesk, however they should implement Intel’s HD capabilities, it’s so much more efficient! In short, Virtue will switch between your GC and Intel’s HD depending on the task at hand and choosing the most proficient GPU for the job.