ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 Motherboard Review @ [H]

it's PLX.... in short it gives you some more PCIe lanes, so if you put a card into 3rd slot it will not cut some of the features from board.
 
Zarathustra[H];1038003158 said:
What is this PLEX chip of which you speak?

I ask because I am curious and have never heard the term before. Googling it did not help
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There are only a certain number of PCI-E lanes coming from the CPU. This PLX chip allows you to have more lanes, in a nut shell you can do tri-GPU with out turning things like USB controllers and SATA controllers off.

The high end ASUS deluxe boards have this PLX chip well, but they cost considerably more than this ASROCK board.

As corrected its the PLX PEX8608 chip, not PLEX. My bad
 
Zarathustra[H];1038003087 said:
This is very interesting, especially since I have heard many people speak well of ASRock with the justification:

"Well, they are a subsidiary of ASUS, so you are just getting an ASUS quality board with a different name".

I guess that really isn't the case :p
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ASRock was spun off from Asus in 2002.
Currently they're owned by Pegatron, which was spun off from Asus this year, but still a wholly owned subsidiary.
Essentially ASRock is a low-grade commodity board production arm for Asus with a couple layers of corporate separation for ass-coverage.
 
Met-AL said:
I noticed that myself with my board. Quite a bit of warping.

I have a friend who is an engineer and qualifies parts for use in severs and embedded controllers in the telecommunications industry. Most of the hardware he deals with comes from Intel for their work. His lab gets samples of motherboards and CPU's way before they are actually released to the market, they test them, send feedback to Intel and so forth.

A while back when he and I were talking about building our new PC's, he was in CompUSA killing some time on a shopping trip with the family. He started looking over all the display samples they had there and he said the same thing you are saying here Dan about ASUS boards. He told me, ASUS had shoddy part placement, some things weren't inserted all the way through the PCB before soldering, and that the board was thinner than Gigabyte boards. He had concerns with the conductive layers of the ASUS boards based on his observation of the thinner overall thickness of the PCB. He also questioned some of the layout choices they made, not things like this port should be here that plug there, but down on the component level. He chalked that up to ASUS attempting to wring every little drop of cost/performance out vs iron clad stability.

He did say it was probably fine for Joe homePC but that stuff would never make into their hardware. Coincidentally, he used an ASUS board for his PC and I chose the ASRock board because I wanted the PLEX chip.
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While Gigabyte's build quality does sometimes seem slightly better, the truth is where the rubber meets the road ASUS boards are just as stable as anything Gigabyte has to offer and in my experience, less quirky. Gigabyte sometimes has BIOS issues and quirks that ASUS boards simply don't have. Generally I judge them to be about equal in most respects. Especially now that Gigabyte has changed their color scheme to something that isn't hideous. MSI is pretty close to ASUS for build quality, but a little quirkier than Gigabyte as well.
 
Dan_D said:
While Gigabyte's build quality does sometimes seem slightly better, the truth is where the rubber meets the road ASUS boards are just as stable as anything Gigabyte has to offer and in my experience, less quirky. Gigabyte sometimes has BIOS issues and quirks that ASUS boards simply don't have. Generally I judge them to be about equal in most respects. Especially now that Gigabyte has changed their color scheme to something that isn't hideous. MSI is pretty close to ASUS for build quality, but a little quirkier than Gigabyte as well.
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ASUS has been my quirky brand. I had always bought ASUS, so maybe I have had more than some people, but rarely does an ASUS board end up in my hands that doesn't have some quirk to it. Most of the time its benign and doesn't matter though.

My sons ASUS socket AM2+ motherboard is a very quirky motherboard. It runs Windows XP just fine, but when I went to finally install Windows Vista on it, the clock ran hella fast and everything else based off the timing ran fast... things like the cursor would blink so fast you couldn't tell it was even blinking. The network card couldn't connect to the router because the timing was so out of wack. The minute hand on the clock would make a revolution every 4 minutes. Things like that.

So I started Googling my weird problem and found some forum posts over at ARS about one guy having the same issue and no help from ASUS. I then pulled up the product at NewEgg and started sorting through the product feedback... low and behold, tons of people were posting the same thing and returning the motherboards. Returning it for me wasn't an option as it's about 2yrs old at this time.

So I contacted ASUS about it, linked to posts on their shitty forum system talking about it, and they played dumb. Told me to update the BIOS (already did).

In the end.... making the motherboard pause after posting for like 10 seconds solved the problem. I figured that out after days of trial and error and wasted time.

This was why I didn't get an ASUS board this time, simply because they pissed me off with a known problem with one of their products.
 
Met-AL said:
ASUS has been my quirky brand. I had always bought ASUS, so maybe I have had more than some people, but rarely does an ASUS board end up in my hands that doesn't have some quirk to it. Most of the time its benign and doesn't matter though.

My sons ASUS socket AM2+ motherboard is a very quirky motherboard. It runs Windows XP just fine, but when I went to finally install Windows Vista on it, the clock ran hella fast and everything else based off the timing ran fast... things like the cursor would blink so fast you couldn't tell it was even blinking. The network card couldn't connect to the router because the timing was so out of wack. The minute hand on the clock would make a revolution every 4 minutes. Things like that.

So I started Googling my weird problem and found some forum posts over at ARS about one guy having the same issue and no help from ASUS. I then pulled up the product at NewEgg and started sorting through the product feedback... low and behold, tons of people were posting the same thing and returning the motherboards. Returning it for me wasn't an option as it's about 2yrs old at this time.

So I contacted ASUS about it, linked to posts on their shitty forum system talking about it, and they played dumb. Told me to update the BIOS (already did).

In the end.... making the motherboard pause after posting for like 10 seconds solved the problem. I figured that out after days of trial and error and wasted time.

This was why I didn't get an ASUS board this time, simply because they pissed me off with a known problem with one of their products.
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I've dealt with a ton of ASUS motherboards. More than I could probably ever count. I've rarely seen any quirks with them and that's usually what ends up in my builds. Though I have to say that AMD processor compatible boards tend to be quirkier than their Intel counterparts. This is as true with ASUS as it is with anyone else.
 
Zarathustra[H];1038003675 said:
I miss ABIT :(
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I never got around to owning an Abit. I wanted to try one of them as well as a Tyan brand.

Abit went away and Tyan got out of the non-server market right away, but I did get to run a Tyan Tachyon G9700-ProM which was a pretty sweet ATI Radeon 9700-Pro with some custom hardware monitoring built in.
 
I own an ASUS Maximus Gene-Z which, while admittedly it's a MicroATX board, was exceedingly cheap for what it offers. It's available for slightly less than the reviewed ASRock POS, so I have to agree, I see no reason anyone would spring for the ASRock.
 
Met-AL said:
I never got around to owning an Abit. I wanted to try one of them as well as a Tyan brand.

Abit went away and Tyan got out of the non-server market right away, but I did get to run a Tyan Tachyon G9700-ProM which was a pretty sweet ATI Radeon 9700-Pro with some custom hardware monitoring built in.
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ABIT had often cut a lot of corners in their builds and their boards, while exceptionally overclockable had issues of their own. Though some of their earlier enthusiast offerings were excellent products despite any of the minor quirks they had. Tyan on the other hand used to be a premium quality brand but their quality in the last several years has suffered. They cut a lot of corners these days. Though they tend to mask them by keeping thick PCB's and short changing you on voltage hardware. Their boards are now fairly quirky. In that market space, Supermicro is your best bet, followed by Intel. The latter of course isn't an option with Opteron based solutions.
 
I guess some of us have gotten lucky without all the issues Kyle ran into. Mine wasn't warped or bent. I checked everything out before I installed it into my case. My buddy just bought a MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) and it was DOA. So it happens to all companies not just ASRock. It's a risk when buying electronics from any vendor or company. This goes for all electronics.

My next board will be whatever I decide! It's my money and I'll spent it the way I want. And most here I'm sure will agree. Happy holidays! :)
 
While doing some looking to find a "roundup" that includes the ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe and Pro to see if the PLX chip does anything for peformance in a 2x GPU setup, I found a photo of a warped P8Z68 board just like the ASROCK was.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/asus_p8z68-v_pro_review

Scroll the page so that the edge of the motherboard in the 2nd picture is right on the bottom of your screen and you can really see how warped that thing is.
 
Just bought the P67 version of the Extreme4 Gen3 board with 2500k + 8GB Gskill. Works like a champ so far (not a lot of time into it), and kind of glad maybe I saved a few $'s with the P67 instead of going for the Z68.

However, as we all know, 100 different owners will have 100 different experiences (and opinions). I'd like to maybe see Kyle/Dan do a bit of follow-up on this (though I have no doubt they might be too busy to return to this after receiving a replacement).
 
Zarathustra[H];1038003675 said:
I miss ABIT :(
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ABit was OC-friendly and built some interesting boards (owned two of the BP-6 dual-celeron setups), but their stability was pretty bad. I owned several different ABit boards at various times. Granted, at the time, lots of the boards were really "finicky"
 
After reading this thread, it looks like a lot of the people saying "I own that and no problem on my end" (including myself) are either referring to the P67 version or are not specifying which version of the Extreme4 they own. Maybe there actually is a difference in quality beyond the chipset and backplate connecters. What's the thickness of the Z68 E4's PCB anyway? I have half a mind to break open my case and have at it with some calipers.
 
I've read of other Z68 MBs having problems with PCI slot not detecting correct pci speed and not working for video output..
 
Without the cirlce jerk, realistically I've had high end boards fail in performance and fuctionality along with the cheap ones.
I pretty much stayed away from boards under $200, because they tend to have the most issues. Remember the ASUS 1155 Pro's earlier this year?
There has only been a small number of motherboards that recieved 5 eggs on Newegg after enough people got their hands on them. Most get 4 eggs becuase of DOAs, user incompetence etc.

I bought a cheap Asrock Extreme 1366 and it was DOA out of the box. Bullshit. Never wanted to own a Asrock again and bought an ASUS R3E.
Recently I needed a better motherboard layout for my case so I tried the Asrock Fatal1ty Z68 with my fingers crossed.
I'm truly impressed by this board and I like it more than the M4E I had also. I agree with Kyle, it can be hit or miss, but if you miss it can result in you not trusting them anymore.
But ASUS, Gigabytes, MSI all fail at some point also, one may have better CS than the other, but your board still failed.

If you look on Newegg right now, the only board with 50+ owners above $200 that has 5 eggs is the Asrock Fatal1ty Z68. I have one and it's that good.
 
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I do think it's pretty crazy how times have changed when these days we're disappointed when we "only" get an 800mhz overclock. A 4.2ghz Core i7 is still a ridiculously fast chip that far exceeds the normal usage needs of most. It wasn't that long ago that AMD-FX chips were all the rage and if you'd be impressed if you got more than a 100mhz overclock. Now if we can't hit close to 5ghz, we feel like we practically got ripped off!
 

Yeah but the morons on Newegg knock eggs off for stuff like "this atx board doesn't fit in my dell minitower" or "newegg didn't ship on time, so I'm giving it one egg." I'd love if Newegg ratings were worth anything, but in most cases they're not.
 
littledoc said:
I do think it's pretty crazy how times have changed when these days we're disappointed when we "only" get an 800mhz overclock. A 4.2ghz Core i7 is still a ridiculously fast chip that far exceeds the normal usage needs of most. It wasn't that long ago that AMD-FX chips were all the rage and if you'd be impressed if you got more than a 100mhz overclock. Now if we can't hit close to 5ghz, we feel like we practically got ripped off!
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My 286 overclocked from 6Mhz to 12mhz (100%!)

My 486sx25, overclocked to 50Mhz (100%!)

My Duron 650, hit 950mhz (46%)

My Pentium 150Mhz hit 200Mhz (33%)

My current 3.2Ghz 1090T hits 4Ghz (25%)

This is currently the lowest overclock I ever achieved percent wise, except for a my Athlon 1200, but that was back when there was competition, so both AMD and Intel were pushing things harder...
 
aye..i have the extreme3 gen 3..and..it's not so bad.. will boot up to 5500 mhz..probly can get 5300 mhz stable..once i get my cooling solution in check (or lap my 6 day old cpu) umm..i'm trying to hold out for raystorm..i lapped the bow off my rasa.coldplate...so i'm having cooling probs above 4.7....
 
Wow, can't believe the experience the reviewers had with this board, and the hammering review given.
I've had the Z68 Extreme4, Gen3 for a few months now, and found it fantastic.
i5 2500k set to 4.5Ghz in literally 2mins, running solid and stable. Found the software and bios easy to use, no issues or faults.

I saw another site mentioning this board was a sluggish poor performer because it was 2fps slower in BF3....not sure that justifies a sluggish rating??

Anyway, been nothing but happy so far, and I've owned quite a fair share of boards over time.
Thanks for the review, shame you had the experience you did.
 
I've had this board since the BF3 beta and my experience has been exactly the opposite of this review.

OC'ing was easy as can be. Since my is only a gaming rig, having my 2600k at 4.6ghz was good enough for. I just set it to 4.6 auto in the BIOS, disabled spread spectrum and left everything else on auto. My volts and temps are low.I can do 5.0ghz but with a Hyper 212+, I'm not comfortable with the temps.

Another things missing form the review is the talk about the X-Fast utility which really does work well to improve USB2.0 performance.

Anyway, I'm very happy with the board and it's been the most stable, easy to use board that I can think of.
 
djsb said:
After reading this thread, it looks like a lot of the people saying "I own that and no problem on my end" (including myself) are either referring to the P67 version or are not specifying which version of the Extreme4 they own. Maybe there actually is a difference in quality beyond the chipset and backplate connecters. What's the thickness of the Z68 E4's PCB anyway? I have half a mind to break open my case and have at it with some calipers.
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Yeah but if you look at review the "reviewer" slammed whole brand as shoddy based on his "experience".
 
Zebra123 said:
Wow, can't believe the experience the reviewers had with this board, and the hammering review given.
I've had the Z68 Extreme4, Gen3 for a few months now, and found it fantastic.
i5 2500k set to 4.5Ghz in literally 2mins, running solid and stable. Found the software and bios easy to use, no issues or faults.

I saw another site mentioning this board was a sluggish poor performer because it was 2fps slower in BF3....not sure that justifies a sluggish rating??

Anyway, been nothing but happy so far, and I've owned quite a fair share of boards over time.
Thanks for the review, shame you had the experience you did.
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You have to understand, quality control is lacking with some brands. Quality seems to vary a lot with this manufacturer. Beyond that the bar for UEFI and software has been set a lot higher than ASRock seems to be able to attain. Once you've used as many boards as I have you'll start to get really, really picky about minor things. And that's part of the point. There are so many good boards out there that separating them comes down to miniscule criteria. Though in this case the thin warped ass PCB and other minor quirks added up make this particular ASRock board a no go for me.

This doesn't mean everyone will have the same experience as me, nor does it mean everyone else has the same standards I do. Again I've got to get really picky with these things. Most every board that comes across my test bench is pretty good. As for the tone of the review, I've been far more harsh with some other boards and brands than I have with ASRock. Ask MSI or Gigabyte about that. :)
 
$195 for the ASROCK E4G3 vs $269.99 for the ASUS P6Z68 Deluxe.

$75 difference in price... I can live with a motherboard that is "warped" from the retention pressure of the heatsinks and flattens out when simply placed into a case.
 
I was just over at the CM store checking out their Veteran Day Sale and noticed that the SB heatsink on this ASRock board is a knock off of CM's V8 Cooler.

http://www.coolermaster.com/product.php?product_id=5279
v8.jpg


Now that is kinda cheesy. :D
 
I almost bought this board but just couldn't buy a ASROCK board... (this was months ago now but i have heard great and not so great things from people (subjective because people love to think what they have is the best))

I am happy with my MSI Z68A-GD65 G3 board, was little cheaper and I have had little to no issues with the board to speak of and OCs are solid.

Glad to read that I made a good choice. to bad to hear that the Assrock board is suck though
 
Met-AL said:
$195 for the ASROCK E4G3 vs $269.99 for the ASUS P6Z68 Deluxe.

$75 difference in price... I can live with a motherboard that is "warped" from the retention pressure of the heatsinks and flattens out when simply placed into a case.
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With respect, you're not comparing apples to apples.

The ASUS P8Z68-V Pro is more comparable, IMO, and costs $209 for the Gen3 model.
 
bAMtan2 said:
Reviewing a broken board doesn't make sense...
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Everything else still worked. A PCIe x16 slot which we didn't even use due to having onboard video didn't impact any other testing. There was no need to send the board back just for that particular issue. I don't know why people have trouble understanding this.
 
Dan_D said:
Everything else still worked. A PCIe x16 slot which we didn't even use due to having onboard video didn't impact any other testing. There was no need to send the board back just for that particular issue. I don't know why people have trouble understanding this.
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because people are being bitches... you should see the thread about this review on OCN... it is so funny to read through. Whinning little kids that bought this board and think it is the best board in the world... and then you guys ripped it a new one. I laugh because AssRock boards are known to be cheap/junk... get over it.
 
I guess I got a good one. I only ran the chip at stock speed for the amount of time it took to set the multiplier to 50, change the voltage and the reboot.
That was it. Built the entire system that way and have been using it for a couple of months now.

i2500K@ 5GHz, 16GB of some off-brand RAM, NZXT Phantom case, Radeon 5970, Vertex 3 Sandforce 2 SSD, 1TB cheap HD, Blue-ray burner, some kind of Audigy, 20''26''20'' Eyefinity and 4 USB drives dangling off the setup at various locations.
Anyway had two 12 hr LAN parties running Windows 8 DEV and thus far no issues at all.
Rock solid and stable. Was one of the easiest overclocks I have ever done.

I must have got a golden ticket :D
 
yashooa said:
I guess I got a good one. I only ran the chip at stock speed for the amount of time it took to set the multiplier to 50, change the voltage and the reboot.
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So ... does IBT pass 10 loops? Does cpu-z show the multi clocking down a few bins during IBT?
 
Nickbaldwin86 said:
because people are being bitches... you should see the thread about this review on OCN... it is so funny to read through. Whinning little kids that bought this board and think it is the best board in the world... and then you guys ripped it a new one. I laugh because AssRock boards are known to be cheap/junk... get over it.
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Right because all those owners are lying to themselves that they have no problems using this mobo ;)
Anyway I'm happy with posts like yours. The more people like you with blind brand hate the more cheap asrock mobos for smart enthusiasts :D
 
Met-AL said:
Feature wise the deluxe is comparible.
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I didn't know the Extreme 4 Gen3 had dual NICs.

The Deluxe also lacks the three video outputs that both the V-Pro and the Extreme 4 Gen 3 have.

The V-Pro isn't exactly the same either --but I find it a closer match than the Deluxe, and its cost is more in line with the Extreme 4 Gen 3.
 
LoneWolf said:
I didn't know the Extreme 4 Gen3 had dual NICs.

The Deluxe also lacks the three video outputs that both the V-Pro and the Extreme 4 Gen 3 have.

The V-Pro isn't exactly the same either --but I find it a closer match than the Deluxe, and its cost is more in line with the Extreme 4 Gen 3.
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The Vpro lacks the PLX bridge, which the both the deluxe and E4G3 have.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...p8z68-v-pro-gigabyte-z68x-ud3h-b3,2939-5.html
Lacking the PLX bridge found on the company's more expensive products, it’s impossible to populate all of the P8Z68-V Pro’s interfaces simultaneously. The second PCIe x1 slot is, for example, shared with the front-panel USB 3.0 controller and the four-lane x16-length bottom slot. When one of the two slots is filled, electronic switches disable the other two interfaces. The features get even sparser when the bottom slot's x4-mode is enabled; doing so disables the first x1 slot and the eSATA controller.
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