Asrock Z68 Extreme4 Motherboard Reviewed

Nice review. SRT looks really promising.
I noticed this motherboard has UEFI. Is there a significant difference in boot times between this and BIOS?
 
Umm, not to be disrespectful, but isn't the point of virtu that it will save you power on i mode, though GPUs these days tend to have very capable power-scaling capabilities - shouldn't you have looked into the this?
 
Nice review. SRT looks really promising.
I noticed this motherboard has UEFI. Is there a significant difference in boot times between this and BIOS?

Please check out our 5-Way Intel P67 Motherboard Shootout which features the Asrock UEFI...

https://www.techspot.com/review/380-intel-p67-motherboard-roundup/

Umm, not to be disrespectful, but isn't the point of virtu that it will save you power on i mode, though GPUs these days tend to have very capable power-scaling capabilities - shouldn't you have looked into the this?

To be honest the Lucid Virtu was a last minute addition to the review, initially we were only going to focus on the SSD caching performance and then decided to do some Virtu testing.

Having said that I have just recently looked into the power consumption figures and found that neither the i-Mode or d-Mode saves any power, idle and stress results were much the same.

Still I will continue to do more testing and next time we touch on the Z68 chipset these results will be included.
 
Just about to send off my Asus P8P67 Pro board for replacement due to the first revision Sandy Bridge problem, wonder if it's worth selling the replacement and pickup up a Z68 board.... hmm.
 
Sounds like SRT will be a nice feature to have in a few years when the oft announced drop in SSD prices will come. Unless you're a super early adopter, and actually have a spare low capacity SSD laying around, then you're probably using your SSD drive as a boot drive.

$50 for a 20 GB drive is way too much. Now if they offered the retail version for something like $20-$30, they may get more people to pick them up for this express purpose of using SRT.
 
In a few years time hopefully SSDs will be far more viable to get as standalone drives so that SRT is not actually needed; the tests from this review basically told me that when it came for normal IO especially with larger files it did very little to help read/write times, but really took off with boot time and program loading. I already follow using a smaller drive for boot (in my case a WD black 640) and then use larger drives for mass storage (4x Samsung 1TB in RAID5), so I'd probably be better off with a dedicated SSD. Plus, if the new Corsair Force lives up to its purported performance and stays at that "low" price, I might just pick up one of the 120GB drives as a main boot drive.
 
Would you ever change a motherboard and NOT reinstall windows?

Sure why NOT you can easily get away with it these days. Since installing Windows 7 on my office PC it has seen three motherboard changes without reinstalling. Having to create a fresh install for my office PC is a lengthy procedure so I try to avoid it ;) The thing runs like a dream so I saw no need.
 
How do you get 3 PCIe x16 slots on a board when the Z68 system has 16 lanes from the CPU and 8 lanes from the Z68 chip? I'm a bit confused as to how they connect all the cards up.
 
For three PCIe x16 slots, the 32 lanes normally available for SLI/CrossFireX/TriFire are organized x16/x8/x8.
 
All the info you could ever need about al892.
very capable BUT includes Stealth DRM ... Bad realtek
http://www.realtek.com/products/productsView.aspx?Langid=1&PFid=28&Level=5&Conn=4&ProdID=284

5.1 plus simultaneous 2.0 sound useful or what
 
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