X79 Extreme6/GB Motherboard Overview
The ASRock Extreme6/GB motherboard has a very attractive style to it. With a black PCB and gunmetal and black accents the board is definitely going to look good inside of your case. Around the board you will notice Premium Gold Caps (2.5 x longer life time), 100% Japan-made high-quality Conductive Polymer Capacitors.
Starting at the middle of the board you have Intel’s 2011 socket. While it looks a little cramped in there with the Solid Caps, they should not interfere with CPU cooler installation. Above the CPU socket is your power delivery components. This board uses a 12+2+1 power phase design using a CHiL CHL8328 all digital voltage regulator. ASRock is using ferrite core chokes as you can see from the photos below. The power delivery components are cooled by a large and attractive heatsink that has an “X79” logo on it. All the way at the top of the board you have your 8pin CPU power connector and two fan connectors, one 3pin and one 4pin.
On each side of the CPU socket are your memory slots. There are four on each side, giving you a total of eight. So that means the board supports dual quad channel memory. According to ASRock the board supports 64GB of memory up to DDR3-2400. One thing I did not like is that all of the slots are the same color. Usually they are color-coded so you know where to install memory if you are not going to be using all of the slots. Along the far edge of the board you have the 24pin ATX power connector, single SATA 6GB/s connector and USB 3.0 header.
Moving down there are 8 more SATA connectors. The grey ones are SATA 6GB/s and the black ones are SATA 6GB/s. The top black and grey ports are controlled by the ASMedia ASM1061 chip and the bottom black and grey ports are controlled by the X79 chipset. Right below the SATA ports is another 4pin fan connector. The PCH is cooled by a very attractive heatsink and small fan. Along the bottom of the board you will find many different connections and buttons. From right to left you have reset and power buttons, front panel connectors, debug LED, 3pin fan connector, 3 USB 2.0 headers, firewire header, COM header and HD audio headers.
As far as expansion slots go you have three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and two PCI slots. The top two PCIe x16 slots will always run at x16, but they third slot will run a x8 speed. Above the top PCIe 3.0 x16 slot is a molex power connection if your system needs it. On the back of the board is all of your connections. Going from left to right you have two PS/2 ports, clear CMOS button, coaxial, optical audio, four USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet, four USB 2.0 ports, firewire, eSATA and audio.
Mar 31, 2015 0
Mar 31, 2015 0