ASRock Z170 Extreme 7+ Motherboard

For those of you interested, the crew at ThinkComputers has posted a review of the ASRock Z170 Extreme 7+ motherboard today.

The Z170 Extreme 7+ is build on ASRock’s Super Alloy Design, features a 12-phase all digital power design, three Ultra M.2 slots, four USB 3.1 ports, support for quad-SLI and 3-way CrossFire, ASRock’s Purity Sound 3 and more! As you can see this board has quite a lot to offer and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Looks good, but I just can't justify spending over $200 on a motherboard that isn't for a -E platform.

The #1 rule of real estate applies here. For the same amount of money, it is always better to own a hovel in the most expensive neighborhood than a castle in the cheapest neighborhood.

Also, isn't AsRock supposed to be Asus' budget brand?

Also, three M2 slots seems very overkill.

I'd rather have the extra PCIe slots.

Does anyone sell risers that can turn M.2 slots into proper PCIe slots yet?

I'd populate one of those slots with a large fast SSD, and use the other two for PCIe, if possible.

Here's what I'd pay good money for.

A motherboard that - by using a simple FPGA or something like that - allows you to dynamically allocate the available PCIe lanes from the pool of all available lanes to the slots of your choice.

Give a motherboard 7 (or 8) x16 slots, and let me - in the bios - fully customize which PCIe (or m2) slots get how many lanes.

That's kind of off topic though.

Zarathustra[H];1041856864 said:

Here's what I'd pay good money for.

A motherboard that - by using a simple FPGA or something like that - allows you to dynamically allocate the available PCIe lanes from the pool of all available lanes to the slots of your choice.

Give a motherboard 7 (or 8) x16 slots, and let me - in the bios - fully customize which PCIe (or m2) slots get how many lanes.

That's kind of off topic though.

Click to expand...

Full control? What enthusiast wouldn't say, "shut up and take my money!"?

Annoying review.
Most of the charts make tiny differences in performance look huge.
When doing it to that extreme, they should provide a baseline with % difference as well.
I dont think I've ever visited thinkcomputers,org before, I know to avoid now.

Zarathustra[H];1041856849 said:

Looks good, but I just can't justify spending over $200 on a motherboard that isn't for a -E platform.

The #1 rule of real estate applies here. For the same amount of money, it is always better to own a hovel in the most expensive neighborhood than a castle in the cheapest neighborhood.

Also, isn't AsRock supposed to be Asus' budget brand?

Click to expand...

This is a low cost Z170 board for Quad-SLI, if you don't get into the should you even do Quad SLI on a Z170 or the should you even do Quad -Sli ever

zaniix said:

This is a low cost Z170 board for Quad-SLI, if you don't get into the should you even do Quad SLI on a Z170 or the should you even do Quad -Sli ever

Click to expand...

yeah, lol.

It's more for bragging rights than anything else.

The scaling is so poor even with just two cards, and adding a third or a fourth only makes it worse.

You wind up using more power, making more noise and heating up the room faster, with very little to show from it in a performance perspective, and actually worse input lag due to the AFR render modes.

And that's on a -E board with plenty of PCIe lanes.

Now subtract PCIe Lanes and it only makes it worse

I'm all for being [H] and all, but over the years I have learned that the best GPU solution is a single GPU solution. Only go multi-GPU if the fastest single GPU isnt fast enough.

Unfortunately I am stuck with two GPU's right now for 4k. Hopefully when Pascal comes out, that will no longer be the case.

for whats it worth, my solitary experience with an asrock mobo has been good so far.

only asrock mobo ive ever bought is for my current compy (which was a low-cost mini-upgrade). bought used on ebay for $100 or so.

asrock z68 extreme 7 gen 3

bought it for the looks (not ashamed), digital power phase + decent capacitors, and beefy heatsinks. havent had issues, got my 2500k to 5GHz (cpu was used too), and the mobo hasnt melted, so thats nice.

only complaint is no PS/2 port. glad to see the reviewed mobo has a PS/2 port (PS/2-to-USB adapters can be so janky).

I will never buy another ASRock product after the disaster that was z77 Extreme4. They got caught red handed completely lying about CPU vcore readouts. Say I set a fixed voltage with LLC level 2 for my processor's vcore at 1.25v. It might read just about that same number in programs like CPUz, MSI Afterburner, etc. But in reality when you put a DMM up to the actual pins on the back of the CPU socket, you'll see the real voltage, which is something more like 1.32v and higher during load. Absolute bullshit. Never again going with these cheap chink liars.