Layout

At a first glance the ASRock OC Formula leaves a very good impression with its harmonic design. The manfucaturer decided to go for a combination of black, yellow and gold, which suites nicely and in the end you get an aesthetic product. The layout itself is well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install even todays largest CPU coolers. The fact that there are SATA connectors which have been angled by 90 degrees allow an easy installation of oversized graphics cards.

The ASRock OC Formula comes with a digital 12+4 phase power design. The CPU gets twelve phases and the memory gets a stable current supply from four individual phases. As we've already mentioned on the feature's page, ASRock decided to go for quite a complex power design where there are for example three different filtering stages to get smooth and highly constant voltages. Especially when it comes to extreme overclocking, the power design can be what tipped the scales in the end.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the OC Formula. Officially supported are DDR3 3000+(OC) / 2800(OC) / 2666(OC) / 2400(OC) / 2133(OC) / 1866(OC) / 1600 / 1333 / 1066 MHz. There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you wont encounter compatibility problems with big coolers even when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 1.3.

On the OC Formula the southbridge as well as current converters got separate cooling blocks. In case of the southbridge there is a single block made from aluminium, which provides appropriate cooling. A closer look at the current converters shows that there are two individual blocks connected to one another by a watercooling channel. Furthermore ASRock decided to equip the power design coolers with a 40 millimeter fan. For extreme overclockers this is a nice addition, but if you should decide to put this board into a case and you expect low operating noise, then you'll be disappointed after at last half a year. Those small fans quite quickly show issues related to the bearing and they are also very sensitive to dust. In case of putting this board into an enclosure we recommend to unplug the fan.