welcome to my unboxing and first look at the ASRock x79 extreme 11 motherboard
this is pretty much as Extreme as it gets I
mean they took the dial from 1 to
10 and cranked it up to
11 so what's it got going for it this
I'm not that sold on I don't think it has times the system speed with X fast
RAM and I don't think the USB is five times the speed of anyone else's USB 3
although it is five times the speed of USB 2 I don't believe that their Lan is
five times the speed of anything it's gigabit which is either 10 * 10 100 or
it's the same as gigabit so uh but what
it does have is support for core i7 processors on the LGA 2011 platform SLI
and Crossfire X compatibility Windows 7 or Windows 8 compatibility any new board
is going to be just fine with Windows 8 you've got dual PCI E3 plx chips yes it
is that extreme so this board is capable
of running four-way SLI and four-way Crossfire at 16x 16x 16x 16x Yes you
heard me correctly four
pcie3 graphics cards at full
16xp isn't that crazy and because the
board is all PCIe 16x connectors they
can actually run at 16
888888 I mean if you were going to put like six raid cards in a video card in a
board this would be the one okay moving
right along to some other things here before I explain why the packaging is all beat up um 24 plus 2phase power
design with no coil wine by the way I have already fired up this board and put
it under load digital power okay 8 by
DDR3 2500 plus OC although the forms
indicate that it's kind of hard to do that unless you have like exactly the
right cherry pick modules and really it comes down to the CPU more than the
board for things like um 8 dim high-speed memory operation so bear that
in mind you got to have a good memory controller on your CPU dual stack
mosfets this is a new thing here so the silicone silicon die area is increased
by stacking two dyes into a mosfet very cool stuff eight SATA 3/ SAS
connectors from the LSI controller and creative onboard sound with core 3D
audio with premium headset amplifier so yes amped onboard sound onboard SAS with
an LSI controller not Marvel not J Micron nothing like that LSI like the
real deal um yeah dual PCI E3 plx chips those are
expensive chips by the way there's no other high-end board that uses more than
one of them and that's very high-end other boards like this is this is in
terms of the actual cost to ASRock probably the most expensive possible way
to implement everything that they've done here this is a premium board no
jokes uh what else we got here premium gold caps yeah they just like they put
gold on the Caps just because um 8 by USB 3 four front four back Scout mode
here the okay sure let's move right on ack
OMG online management guard Okay Internet Flash oh cool searches for
available ufi firmware updates from ASRock servers Auto detect the latest
BIOS from the servers and Flash them within the ufi setup without entering
the Windows OS that's cool easy raid installer interactive ufi with
apparently music um okay yeah visual
BIOS broadcom dual Lan okay that's unfortunate I would have liked to see
although it does support teaming I would have liked to see Intel Lan however it's
got so many PCIe slots that you can install as many
sort of addin cards as you want if if you're going to spend $600 on a
motherboard I don't think a land card is that much of a stretch so you got a
front uh USB 3 3 and 1/2 in adapter just
in case you don't have that built into your case uh short uh U hard PCB SLI
Bridge um another one three-way SLI Bridge whoops oh wow
okay Simplicity Simplicity is
like kind of my favorite thing ever this
is the best three-way SLI that I have ever
seen nothing no branding blank branding
is here which is good but that is going to look so clean in your system love
it uh 6 SATA 3 6 GB per second cables uh
another hard Bridge again very clean nothing on the front of it uh here you
can take this and install it in this and add additional back panel USB 3 if you
don't want them in the front handy two Molex to SATA power connectors
it's random if you don't have a power supply with SATA connectors on it and you're buying a $600 board your
priorities are wrong IO shield colorcoded for
convenience manual manual okay you got to be kidding me
okay software setup guide this is a quick installation
guide download the latest drivers from the ASRock website don't use
this that's a novel not a quick installation guide that's a full manual
guys um now let's have a look at the board
and I will sort of quickly explain why it looks like this this is my cat um I
have already tried this board I took it out so that I could uh so I could test
it for coil wine cuz I'm looking for a new build for my personal or a new board
for my personal rig and uh I was like
super disappointed when I came back in the room and he had absolutely shredded
the packaging for it so um hopefully
that's not going to be a problem for me at any point in time also it was
strapped in with these but I have already undone them so it was zip tied
in so that it's going to be totally safe in shipping I'm actually really
impressed with the way this board is packaged see no possibility for it to go
anywhere nice soft foam and this is the board so a few things that are unique
about this board um the engineering that goes into building something this
extreme should not be understated
because this is a standard ATX length
board it's an eatx and that it's a little bit longer but it's not full eatx
either so as long as you've got a decent case with a little bit of extra width
this board will fit eight dims seven PCI
slots cannot emphasize that enough does
not exist in a standard length board other than this one no one else was able
to do it and the fact that they had to put in dual plx chips to get so I mean
no one else even did 16 16 16 16111 or
anything like that nobody did this and
they had to build in additional chips in order to make it happen and they have 8
+ 6 hard drive connections so two SATA 3
6 GB per second ports off the Intel chipset four SATA 2 3 GB per second
ports off the Intel chipset and eight SAS 6 gbit per second connections off
the LSI chipset these are mostly intended for storage guys for your boot
drive you should still be using the Intel controller all right post debug
okay I'm getting distracted here because I'm like just on OS truck by the board
there's your 24 phase power up there you can actually see 12x 2 under this uh
under this heat sink right here and then this is the one thing that I was not too
thrilled about with this particular board the fact that it does include a
chipset fan however my understanding is some water cooling company somewhere
might be working on a full board cooler for this board which would make it pretty much the perfect board for the
extreme user because there's no electrical noise and once you get that
fan off it it should be completely silent with all of these connectivity
options built into it all right dual a
pin power connectors in the top left and their ideal locations lots of room
around the CPU socket for you know large coolers water blocks whatever else the
case may be eight dim slots which is
unbelievable given that they've again squeezed it into this tiny form factor
considering all like I mean look how dense the PCB is like even the top
corners like yep put in everything you possibly can everywhere like here just
do like a pen of like here down to the
bottom how much stuff is on this board like a lot
of the time you look at premium products and you're like yeah there's really not that much stuff on it like what were
they spending money on and with this one there is actually no doubt that they
spent a lot of money on it okay 24 pin power connectors in this ideal location
along the right hand Edge two USB 3.0 front panel connectors they're not right
angle but I'll forgive them again they're space constrained at some point I guess on something like this chipset
cooler okay um and for those of you who are suggesting on my blog channel that I
just use a simple uh chipset water block I can't do that because there are four
chips under there see there's the screws plx
plx one of these is going to be South bridge and then one of them is going to
be the uh the LSI controller this is
probably the LSI controller would be my guess hold on where the Trac is going
now that might be the S uh yeah that's the LSI controller and that's the sth
bridge as they used to call them and they don't call them anymore but I still
do cuz I'm old school like that uh onboard power connectors post header or
post uh readout us print USB connectors
auxiliary power is here and here so if you really did want to install four
graphics cards I'd recommend using one or both of those to avoid burning out your 24 pin connector you've got onboard
fire wire onboard HD audio there's your bigger cap for the onboard audio uh
headphone amplifier see badge one yeah
looks kind of neat but I think the Chip's actually under there probably shielded in some way
Neato okay um I think that pretty much
covers it other than oh yeah it's got the sexiest color scheme ever I wish it
had a matte black PCB but since the PCB again is like so covered in stuff that
you don't see it anyway this would have been just perfect for my build if I
could get my hands on a on a chipset cooler for it that's not uh not a fan
the fan actually doesn't turn on until the chipset gets hot but uh the chipset
got hot pretty fast with all those chips under it so um not to mention it's
sharing cooling with this guy right here via this heat pipe and the uh Power
phases are bound to get pretty toasty as well so let's have a look at what we've
got oh right right right right hold on hold on fan fan connectors one three pin
one four pin one three pin one three pin
so that's a total of what three three pins one okay another four pin another
three pin decent number of fan connectors not
a ton though and back panel connectors PS2 Port yay still a must in my opinion8
USB 2.0 ports clear seos dual GB Ethernet fire wire 4 USB 3.0 ports dual
EA ports it's like Overkill much so that
gives us a total of what was this 6 8 14
16 16 SATA connections um optical audio out and 5.1
audio with a mic input thank you for
checking out my unboxing and first look at the ASRock extreme 11 x79 motherboard
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