ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 Motherboard Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 Motherboard Review - Several people on our forums wanted to see a little more brand diversity when it comes to motherboard reviews. Ask and you shall receive. We take our first look at one of ASRock’s "finest" motherboards. The Z68 Extreme4 Gen3. Long name, lots of features, and a big steaming bowl of disappointment.
 
i lol'd.

Also, i kinda feel bad because my friend just got his ASRock z68 extreme 3 in the mail.
 
"Long story short, this board pisses me off." :D

I love [H]ard. Real talk.
 
From the Review:

"I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I suspect it’s because the UEFI sucks."
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:D


Last week I almost bought this MB but opted to get the MSI Z68A-GD65 G3 based on the better warranty and what could possibly be better hardware with the "military Class" electrical components. Also MSI support forums have some positive interaction going on.

I really like the looks and possible benefits of the "Gold" capacitors on the Asrock MB.

Looks like Asrock needs to spend some time on tweaking the BIOS to get this MB to work right. It looks like it has potential. Glad I didn't buy it.
 
Board is working well for me. I have no issues that bothered [H].

Note: When you OC using the windows utility, it works real time, No reboot required, even if it tells you to.

Note: thermal throttling does happen, You need to set MANUAL for turbo overclock, and enter values above 200 for short and long wattage.

board OC's well for me.
 
Unoid said:
Board is working well for me. I have no issues that bothered [H].

Note: When you OC using the windows utility, it works real time, No reboot required, even if it tells you to.

Note: thermal throttling does happen, You need to set MANUAL for turbo overclock, and enter values above 200 for short and long wattage.

board OC's well for me.
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That wasn't the case for me and I have tried this on two ASRock boards at this point. Both the application and CPU-Z, with the system under load confirm that the changes weren't implemented until the system rebooted.
 
Hmm, a perplexing result. I'm generally satisfied with my P67 Extreme 4 Gen 3, which even cost 40 dollars less than the Z68 does (putting it closer to the semi-budget price bracket it belongs in---but still better than what was reviewed here). Could it be a fluke with picking a crappy part from the retailer, or did Asrock choose to lower build quality on the Z68 line for some reason?

(All complaints about the tweaking application are totally valid, of course---that thing sucks and is entirely useless.)
 
Dan_D said:
That wasn't the case for me and I have tried this on two ASRock boards at this point. Both the application and CPU-Z, with the system under load confirm that the changes weren't implemented until the system rebooted.
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interesdting. I can change multi's run OCCT and CPUz will show the change, so will OCCT. My wprime scores drop correspondingly also.


Sounds like these boards are hit or miss atm.

I like mine so far.
 
Dan and Kyle,

Great job with the review. Dan shared all his frustrations with the board and Kyle countered well with what the board did offer (which wasn't much apparently).

Kudos all around! :D
 
Unoid said:
interesdting. I can change multi's run OCCT and CPUz will show the change, so will OCCT. My wprime scores drop correspondingly also.


Sounds like these boards are hit or miss atm.

I like mine so far.
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And that's one of my points. Quality does seem all over the map with these boards. That's one thing I've found common among lower tier manufacturers. This is one reason why, for my money I'd rather have a stripped down ASUS board than some ultra high end ASRock or ECS board.
 
Kyle or Dan??

Did you guys use a water block during the overclocking portion of your review?

In the MSI Z68A-GD65 G3 review you guys stated you used a water block for over clocking.
 
SonDa5 said:
Kyle or Dan??

Did you guys use a water block during the overclocking portion of your review?

In the MSI Z68A-GD65 G3 review you guys stated you used a water block for over clocking.
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Yep. Always. I used a Koolance CPU-350.
 
SonDa5 said:
I hope you didn't recommend it to him. :D
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hahahah reddit can take the blame for that one. They LOVE the asrock z68's, but they're all overclocking noobs anyway and wouldnt be able to distinguish a good motherboard from their back fat. All they see is $$$$.
 
Damn, that's surprising to hear you had so many problems. I just built my rig with this board over the weekend and I love it so far. I fired it up, selected 4.8ghz overclock from the presets and went on my merry way. Stress tested it for a few hours with occt/furmark/prime and it performed flawlessly. Given that I haven't beat on it the way you guys did, but I have absolutely no complaints. I bought it based on the overwhelming amount of positive feedback I have seen on pretty much every forum.
 
B2BigAl said:
Damn, that's surprising to hear you had so many problems. I just built my rig with this board over the weekend and I love it so far. I fired it up, selected 4.8ghz overclock from the presets and went on my merry way. Stress tested it for a few hours with occt/furmark/prime and it performed flawlessly. Given that I haven't beat on it the way you guys did, but I have absolutely no complaints. I bought it based on the overwhelming amount of positive feedback I have seen on pretty much every forum.
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4.8GHz isn't that bad, but I can take most boards further. And overclocking, while not fun on this board for me at least isn't the real issue I have with it. It's the lack of quality. thin, warped PCB, etc. Poor stability is also a problem I haven't experienced with a review board in a long time.
 
I did not have the problems with O/Cing or a warped PCB with this board, but rather annoying ones with the UEFI.

The mouse and keyboard compatibility for the UEFI is awful. The X/Y axis was reversed for my cheapo logitech mouse after a bios flash, rendering it unusable. Keyboard is not detected at all so I have to swap it to a happy hacking keyboard (from logitech g15) to work the UEFI. Lame.

No issues O/Cing from the bios.

I'm rather pleased with it as a whole, though I would have to recommend to use ASUS if I was doing another z68 build.
 
I don't understand buying something like this when ASUS, MSI, (even Intel), and Gigabyte have so many compelling choices at so many price points. This is why I've never looked to ASRock or anyone else's offerings seriously for my own machines.
 
Sounds like my experience with ASRock in the past; had problems with an X58 Extreme up and dying.
1 and done for me, sorry ASRock.

I've been happy and trouble-free with GB and now Asus so I'll continue sticking with those. Next time I decide to "experiment" with another manufacturer, it'll be an MSI.
 
I can never recommend AsRock over ASUS. They have a much shorter warranty also which I always found to be suspect. When the standard is 3 years why offer less?
 
Trying to rip off Gigabyte's look...well you got the look, too bad you didnt put anytime into anything else
 
I guess I'm lucky my board works great.

I only bought it becuase of other reivews and user posts on xtremesystems.

I've always been a DFI man :)
 
SonDa5 said:
I haven't seen a Z68 Gigabyte MB with "gold" capacitors.
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Lol fair enough, i think my screen is a bit off because they just looked normal to me, but the all black design and the black chrome cpu socket...the same. Maybe they should have put a little less gold on the board and a little more into its development lol
 
Dan_D said:
I don't understand buying something like this when ASUS, MSI, (even Intel), and Gigabyte have so many compelling choices at so many price points. This is why I've never looked to ASRock or anyone else's offerings seriously for my own machines.
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I'm usually the same way, I just buy whatever asus has to offer and don't even consider anyone else. However, this board got several other glowing reviews on other sites and editors choice awards, and every forum i've been on the members seemed to really like it. That's why I was surprised by your bad experience, I haven't read any other bad reviews. Normally I wouldn't have even considered an asrock either.
 
I own the extreme 4 gen 3 and the extreme 7 gen 3 and so far they have been the most trouble free and stable boards I've owned. Both overclock very well and run very cool. Don't know what happened with you guys board.
 
I've been running an ASRock P67 Extreme6 board since close to the i7-2600k launch and it's given me no major headaches. I'm running a 2600k at 5GHz on air with a Noctua NH-U12P SE2 and 16GB of DDR3-1600, dual HD5870s and a full deck of storage devices. The layout presented no obstacles save for one - the top 1x PCI-E slot on this board is partially blocked by the onboard MOSFET heatsink shroud. I had to install my X-Fi Titanium in the bottom PCI-E slot instead of above the first 16x PCI-E slot because the card enclosure would impact the heatsink.

The first time I set it up, I booted, configured my devices, clicked the Auto 4.4GHz option and stood back to see what happened. It worked great, passing hours of torture tests, and I eventually tweaked up to 5GHz by adjusting minor options, disabling thermal throttling, increasing the turbo boost length and power limits.

One bug for me was that if I select the 51x multiplier, it will boot at 5100MHz but after a few minutes will step down to 34x and remain there. I've been more than satisfied with 5GHz though and felt that the (measurable) power and heat increase wasn't worth pushing it that last step.

Obviously the Z68 Extreme4 is a different board, and lacks some features and adds others (on-die video output, but no 10 SATA ports, layout, possible PCB construction, capacitors...) but it seems very odd that they would not improve upon the build quality of their predecessors. The P67 Extreme 4/6 boards were very capable, many users had taken chips beyond 5.4GHz on them. It's disappointing to hear that their latest iteration is having quality control issues and hopefully they're listening to this feedback.

Makes you miss the golden years of DFI, doesn't it?
 
Dan_D said:
That wasn't the case for me and I have tried this on two ASRock boards at this point. Both the application and CPU-Z, with the system under load confirm that the changes weren't implemented until the system rebooted.
Click to expand...

Yep, same here, real time changes using the windows utility.

My board works flawlessly and overclocks like a beast. 4.8Ghz by just selecting it in the BIOS.
 
bAMtan2 said:
How do you know his CPU can go further?
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I haven't even tried pushing it further, I was completely happy with 4.8 and how easily I got there. I tweaked nothing, I just selected the preset in the BIOS and it works like a champ. I'm sure I can get more out of it, just haven't had time.
 
So far mine has been working well. No problem adjusting the BIOS through their windows application. I did expect a bit of a higher clock for the money.
 
This is dissapointing and now makes me a little more worrisome about ASRock's X79 offerings.
 
Well this sucks. Ive always like ASRock and have always had good performance from their midrange boards like my current one and I was hoping they could get into the high end and do good. Guess not.

I dont get though how Asus can be the top dawg and own ASRock but let them put out such half assed boards such as these.

Well this seals it for me. Im due up a motherboard upgrade here pretty soon and keep venturing over to the ASRock page on Newegg but after this review and the one on Toms Hardware which had the ASRock 990FX board getting overclocks 600+ MHz lower than the Asus and Gigabyte 990FX boards, there's no denying it.

And---
Long story short, this board pisses me off.
Click to expand...
---is my alltime favorite quote out of any review Ive ever read on anything ever. One more reason why [H] is my homepage. :D
 
I've got this board and have been fairly happy with it. Initially, I experienced the same problems with the asrock tuning utility in Windows - upping the multiplier would not take until a reboot. I uninstalled and reinstalled the software and it is working fine. I had a different, cheap, Gigabyte z68 board that had the same type of issue. It was hit or miss getting the overclock utility changes to stick without a reboot.

The other gripe I had is that the mouse is laggy in the BIOS - I did not have that problem on the cheap Gigabyte board. It wasn't terrible to the point that it actually pissed me off, just slightly annoying.

Some positives - when you set a voltage, you get that voltage. First board that I've had in a while where I didn't have to adjust the volts because the actual voltage was different.

The fan control is great, especially when I've got the gf complaining about the noise :D. Saved me from buying a fan controller.

I'm running my 2600k at 4.8GHz and feel like I could definitely go higher if I had better cooling.
 
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