Layout

Already at a first glance the ASRock Extreme7 Gen3 looks very good with its harmonic design. ASRock decided to use black as a basic color and combined it with some elements in silver and grey. Especially the cooling blocks look very nice and appealing. The layout in general is well thought. Because of the big cooling blocks which keep the mosfets at adequate temperatures there is still enough space to finally install a big CPU cooler but it might get tight.

ASRock equipped the Extreme7 Gen3 with a 8+4 phase current supply whereas the CPU can rely on eight phases and the memory gets an additional four phases. Furthermore ASRock implemented a digital power design which should emit less electromagnetic radiation than its analogue counterpart. Therefore ASRock claims that the system stability can be enhanced even further, especially during extreme overclocking.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Extreme7 Gen3. Officially supported are DDR3- 2133 (OC) / 1866 (OC) / 1600 / 1333 with up to 32 GByte capacity. There is plenty of space to install even big aircoolers and they shouldn't interfere with memory.

Current converters as well as northbridge are being kept at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The southbridge got an independant cooling block which has been nicely designed as well as the other cooling blocks. The aluminium blocks around the CPU socket are quite big. Nevertheless their not too close to the CPU socket which means that this will not compromise the installation of a big CPU coolers.