ASRock X79 Extreme4 LGA 2011 Motherboard Review @ [H]

Turtle Man said:
If one has $2,000 budget for gaming computer, should he go with Z68 or X79.. taking long term upgrade flexibility into consideration.
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Either of those will be fine. I wouldn't go with X79 unless you really want a 3 or 4 GPU setup.
 
Turtle Man said:
If one has $2,000 budget for gaming computer, should he go with Z68 or X79.. taking long term upgrade flexibility into consideration.
Click to expand...

I think an argument could be made for either.

A Core i7-3820 on x79 should perform similarly (if not faster than due to the extra cache, and higher base clock) a Core i7-2700K on Z68.

The 3820 is also about 10% cheaper.

X79 motherboards - on the other hand - are a little bit more expensive though there are more affordable ones as well.

To me it comes down to this:

X79 Advantages:
- PCIe 3.0 today
- Many PCIe lanes
- Quad Channel RAM provides lots of memory bandwidth.
- Upgrade path to expensive 6 core CPU's
- Supports more than 32GB RAM.

Z68 Advantages:
- Price (though not as much as one might think with the Core i7-3820 and a reasonable mobo)
- Sooner upgrade path to Ivy Bridge (Ivy Bridge -E won't be out for a while) with higher clocks, lower power use and PCIe 3.0 (which X79 has today)
- On board GPU (if that's something you are into) and hardware encoding acceleration)

I don't see one platform having a strong advantage over the other. Z68 will be slightly cheaper, but you may find it has fewer PCIe lanes than you'd like.

Personally - even if I were going for 4 cores, I think I would go x79, but that's partially because I like doing things differently from everyone else :p
 
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Zarathustra[H];1038275029 said:
I think an argument could be made for either.

A Core i7-3820 on x79 should perform similarly (if not faster than due to the extra cache, and higher base clock) a Core i7-2700K on Z68.

The 3820 is also about 10% cheaper.

X79 motherboards - on the other hand - are a little bit more expensive though there are more affordable ones as well.

To me it comes down to this:

X79 Advantages:
- PCIe 3.0 today
- Many PCIe lanes
- Quad Channel RAM provides lots of memory bandwidth.
- Upgrade path to expensive 6 core CPU's
- Supports more than 32GB RAM.

Z68 Advantages:
- Price (though not as much as one might think with the Core i7-3820 and a reasonable mobo)
- Sooner upgrade path to Ivy Bridge (Ivy Bridge -E won't be out for a while) with higher clocks, lower power use and PCIe 3.0 (which X79 has today)
- On board GPU (if that's something you are into) and hardware encoding acceleration)

I don't see one platform having a strong advantage over the other. Z68 will be slightly cheaper, but you may find it has fewer PCIe lanes than you'd like.

Personally - even if I were going for 4 cores, I think I would go x79, but that's partially because I like doing things differently from everyone else :p
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It truly is a hard decision. I've been thinking about it basically the same way you summarized it.... its annoying as I've had the funds for this build for about 3 weeks now, and haven't really done squat... maybe ill go the bi-polar route and do 1 of each. Fuck it. Show my true colors. "Bi-Polar Bear Build"
 
I am definitely pumped up about possibly getting one of these bad boards! I originally had an ASRock X58 Extreme and I had absolutely zero problems with it, unlike some other brand that I wont mention... errrhmm. I haven't had a computer in a while so maybe I'll get one built soon.
 
I just ordered this motherboard (ASRock X79 Extreme 4) and the i7-3920 combo from newegg for $514.98. I also ordered a Gigabyte GV-R795WF3-3GD HD7950 and Antec KUHLER H20 620, total for all was $1071.59. I thought it was the best combo deal I could go with, and since the ASRock motherboard does have the bclock feature and people have gotten the 3920 up to 5GHz I said what the hell, it should kill the Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3, Phenom II 955, XFX 5850 setup I have right now. I know its not cheap but really not alot for what I'm getting, and if it last 2-3 years before I have to upgrade again then I will be happy. Called Antec first thing this morning to get the correct mounting for the 620 sent to me for free, think it will be as good if not better than the one intel sells but for about half the cost.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
problem is , to OC the 3820 it's hard to find a board with the bclock feature, even harder to find a 3820 :p
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Umm you can adjust the base clock on any X79 board I've ever seen. You can also adjust the BCLK strap settings if you wish. Though I've had limited success with that last part on some boards. BCLK adjustability is limited on the X79 platform in practice just like it is with P67/Z68.

But technically they all have it.
 
I've just got myself this board and a 3820 CPU and after looking at the reviews from all the major sites I expected to get a great OC board.

As an enthusiast I flashed the latest beta bios into the board (even on the asrock site says its intended at overlcloockers) Which to my surprise had .1MHz BCLK setting ability. I was expecting to own the world at this point. Boy was I in for a shocker.

OFC with this cpu the only way to go is changing the BCLK, but I saw reviews where they said it was as easy as changing the BCLK from 100 to 125 and it worked right away.

Well I went through hell and back and couldn't get the board to boot even at BCLK 105 not to mention 125. I tried everything and it failed miserably. The most I got is 106, but only by going in 1MHz increments from 100. Which is more than appalling. I was expecting high 4000s and what I got is 3816? No way.

I went to the latest non-beta bios, but the results were the same. No boot on any BCLK setting other than 100.

So I went archaic with the v1.90 bios. To my shock with this it was really as easy as setting the bclk to 125 and it lived. Which is 4500Mhz I could live with that and I won't feel that the whole thing was a waste of money. But it remains to be seen if I can get it to be stable at this setting. The signs are not optimistic however. Because if I set the BCLK to even 126 (this bios has only 1Mhz increments) the board boots but windows won't load regardless of the Voltage settings. I even went extreme with it but it would still freeze during loading so I decided its an inherent problem with the mobo and not due to the cpu.

But the problems are not just with cpu overlclocking. I have 4x Kingston Hyprex 1600 memory modules. That worked flawlessly in my X58 board well at least 3 of them - I bought four modules a year ago because I was expecting to upgrade to x79 at some point And I couldn't get the board even to boot at 1600 with either bios version, even at BCLK 100 it fails to boot if I set the DDR frequency to 1600. It only works at 1333. Which is another huge disappointment.


The only reason I choose asrock over other manufacturers are the extra SATA connectors. Because others at this price range only offer the 6 connectors from the x79 chipset. Which is no good for me.

All in all this board is a terrible dissappointment.

And WTF are they doing at ASROCK's bios development team anyway?
 
You're not supposed to change the BCLK, you're supposed to change the clock strap settings to 1.25x, which gives an effective BCLK for the RAM and CPU only of 125. No SB, SB-E, IB, or IB-E processor will be stable with an actual BCLK above 110 or below 90.

As for why it works at 125 BCLK with the old bios, there has to be something buggy going on where it's implementing the clock strap automatically, or you changed the clock strap without realizing it.

Did you set it to 1600 mhz using XMP profile, or did you just set it to 1600? Because otherwise, it'll use stock JEDEC timings, which might be lower than what your RAM is capable of at 1600 mhz.
 
Thanks for the reply but I'm no noob.

This board works in a way that it automatically changes the clock strap, you can't set it manually. So I set the strap to 1.25 by setting the BCLK to 125. I know it's not supposed to work from 110 to 117 ish I haven't even tried any setting between those.

As for the XMP profile I tried three ways:

1. With XMP profile,
2. without xmp profile, and manually setting the timings.
3. And even with XMP profile + manually setting the timings regardless.
 
so whatever happened to the retail board you bought Kyle? Did you ever follow through with that build like described in the review?
 
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