ASRock X79 Extreme9 Review - Price For Performance?
by Ian Cutress on January 24, 2012 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- ASRock
- X79
When I first heard that ASRock were producing an X79 Extreme9, I was a little confused - previously they've not gone above Extreme7, and their Fatal1ty range caters for the gaming crowd. Their lower end models tend to be some of the cheapest around (e.g. Extreme3/4), and their Extreme7 sat nicely in the midrange. With a jump into the high end (with the X79 high-end being even more exclusive), they would need to offer something different compared to the other motherboard manufacturers who typically compete in this price range - ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and EVGA for example. Then they would also need to show that the jump from the Extreme4 or Extreme7 to the Extreme9 would be worth the extra outlay.
So as I wrote in the review, it's hard to place the X79 Extreme9. I have reviewed the Extreme4 and Extreme4-M, both of which were good X79 budget boards for consumers or enthusiasts who wanted to jump into Sandy Bridge-E as cheaply as possible. The X79 Extreme9 comes in around +50% more than those boards ($360 vs. ~$240), meaning I would expect 50% more when it came to the Extreme9.
When we compare the Extreme9 to the Extreme4: power delivery has increased from a 6+2 to a 16+2 phase; we have the full complement of 8 DIMMs for X79 (two per channel); 5 PCIe (but still limited to 3-way SLI/CFX unless dual GPU cards are used); a dedicated audio processor, dual gigabit connections (which can be teamed) rather than a single; more SATA ports (8+4 rather than 5+4); more USB (8+12 rather than 4+12); and a lot more in terms of extras in the box (cables, USB 3.0 back panel). So in terms of functionality, we've got a lot of upgrades here for our extra 50%.
Performance wise, we're not seeing much special, except in the manual overclock area, where at 1.4 V I was able to achieve 4.7 GHz without issue (4.8 GHz booted, and survived a few minutes with a stress test before BSODing, so probably only needs a little boost in voltage to be stable). This is despite the auto-overclocking not working as well as hoped, being very temperamental on the 4.6 GHz setting. In the land of ASRock software, while the XFast LAN and XFast RAM are good additions, the fan controls are a bit geriatric for 2012 compared to the best of their competitors, and a good OS overclocking tool is needed.
ASRock's foray into the high end with their X79 Extreme9 is a case of mix and match. The hardware is almost there, breezing through my benchmarking suite without a hitch, and showcasing 12 SATA ports, upgraded audio, dual teamed NICs as well as a USB 3.0 front panel in the box. The software needs work - it's all very well getting licensed software in, but it has to integrate nicely. Manual overclocking is indicative of a higher end board - I'm tempted to push it on my water cooling system to see if it can beat my 5125 MHz record with the i7-3960X on the P9X79 Pro. The MSRP of $360 does seem a little high to me, but that all depends on what you want from an X79 motherboard.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
14 Comments
View All Comments
Hauk - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 - link
I remember jumping to X58 when I saw that a reasonably priced cpu (i7 920) which would OC like crazy came available. Not so much with X79, still waiting for i7 3820, all parts on hand, including an ASRock Extreme 7 ($259). It's not such a bad platform when cheap mobo's, cpus, and DDR3 are available. What about it Intel?? Stupid move IMO not getting 3820 to market sooner. X79 could have garnered more steam than it has..landerf - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 - link
For the record Creative's Core3D doesn't offload openal, in case anyone was expecting it too.BPB - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 - link
Does this board support SRT? If so I would actually consider spending the money on it.Blibbax - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 - link
"The X79 Extreme9 comes in around +50% more than those boards ($360 vs. ~$240), meaning I would expect 50% more when it came to the Extreme9."It never works like this. Is a Ferrari 5000% better than a Ford? What about 3960x vs. 3930k?
If you want maximum performance per price, there's no way you'd be looking at SB-E anyway.
purefun1965 - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 - link
I feel its overpriced. I would like it more if it was $300.00Stas - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 - link
ClrCMOS button is nice. That's about it.Stas - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 - link
Also, no 24-phase power? O.oAlexIsAlex - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 - link
I mentioned this in the last motherboard review, but as I didn't get an answer either way, I'll ask again just in case:What would be nice, in motherboard reviews, would be a measure of the cold boot (POST) time. This is something that different bioses can be differentiated on, and UFEI offers the potential for very fast boots if manufacturers take advantage of it properly.
Would it be possible to report, for comparison, the time between the power button being pressed and the installed bootloader starting? I was thinking it might be easiest to measure this by having no OS on the boot media and measuring the time to the "please insert boot media" message, but I'm sure you can think of other ways of doing it.
Another commenter also requested that this be done for both stock and overclocked settings, as he found boot times to be much slower with overclocked settings on his motherboard.
bji - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 - link
I would absolutely love to see these figures also. It is a major annoyance to me that my ASUS motherboard takes a full 7 - 8 seconds to even show the POST screen, and a further 1 - 2 seconds after that to get to my bootloader. I would personally highly value a greatly reduced POST time and would like to have this information in motherboard reviews. Having these values measured, evaluated, and compared is the only way that motherboard and BIOS makers will have any incentive to improve.javier_machuk - Sunday, January 29, 2012 - link
I'm on the same boat! my asus z68 board takes longer to post than to load windows with a intel 510 ssd!It would be interesting to compare this values between various manufacturers.