Question for Extreme6 owners

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mhenley

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 21, 2001
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I'm looking into getting an Extreme6 motherboard for a new build, but there's one small snag. Because of my case (Antec 1200) and the cooler that I want to use (H100i), i may not have access to the x1 slot, which is where I was planning on putting my Xonar DX card. I've looked around for a bit and can't find a decent review of the onboard sound system, but the specs on it look nice.

How is the onboard sound quality in comparison to older audio cards with a similar SNR rating?

The other question involves PCIE lanes, since the manual isn't being very helpful on this one. If I install a video card into the top x16 slot, and I end up not liking the onboard sound and want to install my Xonar DX into the bottom slot, is that going to immediately drop my video card to x8?
 
Are you refering to the ASRock Z87 Extreme6 or the 1155 version first of all? If it is the 1150 version then the onboard chip is Realtek ALC1150. Apparently this board is supposed to have some good opamps so I would think the sound would be pretty good. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Audio-ASRock-A-Style-Purity,22418.html

I personally have my systems hooked up to a sony avr to display so my sound is coming from my AMD 7970 over HDMI and I would say that doinr it this way is pretty nice, especially with my 5.1 setup.

As far as PCIE lanes, I think the z78 chipset only has a maximum of 16 lanes unless there is a plx chip on this board, so in theory it might drop your lanes down to 1x16 or 2x8 or 1x8+2x4. In practice for pcie 3.0 there is no real appreciable difference between x8 or x16 maybe +-3%, until you start sli or crossfire configurations.

I hope this helps.
 
I'm happy with the ALC1150 codec on my Maximus VI Hero, but I'm not coming from a dedicated card and every manufacturer's implementations differ so I can't comment directly on that.

As far as the PCIE Lanes go, the x16 slots are the ones coming off the CPU (PCIe 3.0), the x1 slot comes off the chipset and runs at PCIe 2.0 speeds. If you put a card in that slot the 3.0 lanes should be unchanged, its only when you populate any of the x16 slots that the lane allocation will change for your GPU, and as rhansen mentioned, the bandwidth impact would be negligible for single card configurations anyway.
 
My apologies, I was referring to the Z87 Extreme6. I've been using AMD these past few years and am looking forward to making the switch to Intel with this build. That being said, I hadn't even looked for any other Extreme6 versions.

Thank you for your input and comments.
 
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