ASRock Z77 Extreme6 Motherboard Review

The Z77 Extreme6 motherboard from ASRock comes with a nice looking cooling system, which barely gets warm during load and has enough space between PCI-Express x16 slots for installing Crossfire or SLI setups with multi-slot cooling systems. As the previous high-end board we have tested from them, the Z77 Fatal1ty Professional, the Extreme6 also comes with VIRTU MVP support, support for 4x DDR3 2800+ memory in overclocking mode, premium gold capacitors and more. USB 3.0 interfaces are not entirely supported by the Intel chipset, but we have a mix with the Etron EJ168A, which controls two additional ports at the back. The board is also shipped with the 2-in-1 Frontal USB 3.0 panel, which is really handy if we do not have and older computer case which lacks USB 3.0 ports.

The board comes with the friendly Graphical UEFI interface, which makes the board easy to configure; the performance can be also tuned via AXTU (ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility), an application which includes Hardware Monitor, Fan Control, Overclocking, OC DNA, IES and XFast RAM. Besides XFast RAM, the motherboard also comes with the free XFast USB and XFast LAN utilities, meant to boost the respective interfaces.

The VRM is now designed with an 8+4 Power Phase design and we had to struggle a lot for attaining a 4.7GHz stable overclock, compared to the Z77 Fatal1ty model, where it was a real walk in the park. Hopefully this issue will be fixed in the near future, to allow even higher clocks.