Review: ASRock Z77 Extreme 6 with Sandy Bridge
Published by Marc Büchel on 29.03.12Conclusion
| Allgemein | + | - | |
| The Extreme 6 generally is a well equipped and interesting board. You'll find everything needed in order to build a powerful and reliable system. Meanwhile ASRock is one of the manufacturers which have their own and unique design, that is really nice and differs substantially from their competitors. | - Design | ||
| Layout | + | - | |
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Generally the ASRock Extreme 6s layout is very well thought. Once more very practical are the angled SATA connectors. There are also practical power/reset buttons onboard as well as a debug LED. Unfortunately the last expansion slots is a full size PCI Express port, which means that if you choose to install a dual slots graphics card at this place you're going to cover the connectors at the bottom edge of the board. On the other hand there are two slots between the PCIe-x16 slots which means that an SLI or CrossFire setup will get a perfect environment when it comes to cooling. We also liked that ASRock chose to equip this motherboard with no less then six fan headers. Like this every setup can be cooled adequately and the fan headers are furthermore well positioned and therefore easy accessible. |
- Angled SATA connectors - Two slots between first two PCIe-x16 slots - Power/Reset/Clr-CMOS Button - 6 fan headers |
- Full-Size PCI-Express as last slot | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| With the Extreme 6, ASRock definitely succeeded in building a motherboard with a good overall performance level. Compared to the other Z77 we've had for testing so far, it really can keep up with them. If we take a closer look at the performance difference between Z77 and Z68, we see that in certain benchmarks Z77 lacks behind - like wPrime, Resident Evil 5 and 3D Mark Vantage CPU - and in others it is well ahead - SiSoft Sandra and Super Pi. But generally you get a little bit more performance with the Z77 than with the Z68. | - SiSoft Sandra - Super Pi |
- wPrime - Resident Evil 5 - 3D Mark Vantage CPU |
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| BIOS / Overclocking | + | - | |
| Also in the overclocking part the Extreme 6 was a very convincing product. Therefore it's been childrens play to reach the clock wall of our test CPU. Furthermore the UEFI BIOS is very easy to use and one can quickly find the settings needed. There are BIOSes from other manufacturers which are nicer to look at, but that's it. | - Well structured BIOS - UEFI-BIOS | ||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| If you want to build a high end comptuer or gaming system then the ASRock Extreme 6 will be a good choice. | -
High-End - Gaming - Overclocking |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASRock Extreme 6 Gen3 good four out of five stars. | |||
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Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch Copy edited and translated: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch c.ney@ocaholic.ch
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