ASRock Z97 Extreme6 Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 13.05.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| The Z97 Extreme6 from ASRock is definitely an interesting board. Next to an attractive design in black and blue all the different connectors for storage media are interesting. Therefore it doesn't matter whether you want to connect standard SATA drives, drives with SATA Express connector or even M.2 SSDs. In case of the M.2 slots there is even an Ultra M.2 port offering up to 32 Gigabit per second of bandwidth (4 Gigabyte per second). On such a motherboard it's then almost standard there is a capable power design. The 12+2 phases with high-side and low-side on each driver MOSFET will guarantee stable power supply for the CPU as well as to the memory. On another note we one more like the audio solution. What you get is a Realtek ALC1150 with EMI shield and alongside the chip there are high-quality Nichicon capacitors and there is also a headphone pre-amp, which allows for connecting headphones with up to 600 Ohm impedance. | -
Design |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Basically the ASRock Z97 Extreme6's Layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons. There is also a debug display which is very useful in case you should have issues with a component in your system or the board itself. Also the placement of the PCI-Express x16 is very well chosen. Between the first and the second PCI Express x16 slot there are two free slots which means that the first card in a SLI/CrossFire setup gets plenty of fresh air. Another detail we liked is the position of the first PCI-Express x1 slot, that has been located right above the first PCI-Express x16 Gen 3.0 slot. This ensures, that you always have a free x1 slot that can be equipped. | - Angled SATA connectors
- Power/Reset-Button onboard - Debug display - Space around the CPU socket - Audio Solution |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Calcualting the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks in the middle of our 3D benchmarks performance benchmarks which includes Z87 motherboards as well, in other words, it ranked eleventh, When taking the average of all 2D results, the board ranks very close to the end of our chart. Maybe you have noticed that especially SuperPi 32m is faster than on other Z97 we tested these days. Checking the sub timings we found this board set tWR at 16, tWCL at 8 and RTL at 45 on channel A and 46 on channel B. Also the IO-L is optimized well and it's at 3, wich is tight enough. Overall it means this BIOS is at a good startingpoint for memory overclocking. On another note, we had a look at power consumption in idle the new Z97 Extreme6 shows 61 Watts as well as under load it shows 112 Watts wich is in line with other motherboards. | -
PC Mark 07 - UC Bench -3Dmark 11 - Metro Last Night |
- Super Pi 32M - SisSoft Sandra - Wprime 1024M |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| ASRock's new motherboard series all feature different color schemes and these color choices are also present in the BIOS. As we meanwhile expected from ASRock, you get a BIOS which offers more than plenty of features and gamers will be happy they have lots of settings to play with. Apart from that we don't yet like the design too much. We would like it to be more discreet and the structure could be easier visible. We would really love to see ASRock rework it. | - Sheer amount of
options
- Design |
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| Recommendation | + | - | |
| Should you be looking for a well equipped motherboard which offers a lot of interesting features as well as a great look, the asking price of 149 Euro is definitely a bargain. The Extreme6 is one of the boards you can use for almost any application except maybe extreme-overclocking. | -
Price
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Gaming - Enthusiast - Overclocking |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASRock Z97 Extreme6 very good 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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