Asrock Z87 Extreme11/ac Review: 22 SATA ports, 4-way GPU support and more

Julio Franco

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These guys are giving Asus run for their money. I gotta say recently I upgraded my rig and instead of going with Asus, I decided to give Asrock a try, and got myself a Z77 Exetrme6. gotta be honest, it's the best bang for my buck. other than cooking breakfast, and 3 way SLi, this thing can do everything a $300+ mobo can. it took my i7 3770K up to 4.8ghz without much trouble. feature vs feature, this thing just beats Asus by price. hopefully these guys will keep up the good work. only caveat, they're known to have poor customer support. but it's not like Asus won the year of best customer service either. we need more manufactuers like Asrock.
 
Sweet mother of Santa Maria, that is a lot of SATA ports. LSI chip in there too, huge savings over buying a good dedicated RAID card from them, though the logic for more computation intensive RAID (RAID5/6 and variations) is not there.
 
Nice article... crazy board. Wouldn't use all the SATA ports myself but can think of a few who would.

When running @ x8, those PCIe slots are 3.0 slots aren't they? So they'd be pretty substantial anyway?
 
You see many many components with an unjustifiable "Extreme" moniker. This one lives up to that title at the moment especially in the SATA connectors department, not to mention the tortured wallet department.
 
FINALLY! A motherboard with enough storage capabilities to store all of my HD......movies, yeah, movies. ;)
 
Great review, man this board is very sexy I can't believe how far Asrock has come over the years to provide such high end components on par with companies like Asus and Gigabyte. My jaw dropped after reading 22 Sata ports because I mean...Just wow, that's so much!

Having those mini-PCI-E spots with a wireless card built in along with bluetooth, 4 way CFX/SLI support, Dual LAN, that beautiful built in sound card, and the dual USB 3.0 headers on the board is making my drool. Even at 540 bucks which is a bit pricey, just the fact this board contains all these features makes it a good buy for that money.

I don't know why you three above me are complaining about the fans on the board, all that does is give you bonus cooling in extreme overclocking situations and improve the longevity of your board. I doubt the board would have an issue if the fan failed in the realm of overheating at least...

Great board and review.
 
I cannot even begin to comprehend having 22 hard drives in my home computer...
... aww crap, I need to change my boxers.
 
What on earth would you do with 20 SATA ports? Here's the answer.

I would mod a case... we'll call it a REALLY Full Tower, that would hold that many drives. Then... I would worship it, and chuckle when people tell me they are running out of drive space.
 
The absurd thing is that they went the SATA port route verses Mini-SAS connectors. I would buy this in a heartbeat if it had 4x MiniSAS plugs + 6 standard SATA ports. 22 SATA cables? A wiring nightmare!
 
I don't have need of this but still really impressive, I'll be giving Asrock a good look next time I'm thinking of upgrading my motherboard
 
Yeah, an onboard fan is usually a deal breaker for me... if there is no fan then there is no fan to die.
Exactly, and anyone who says different is obviously inexperienced. The fans can get noisy/dusty quickly, easily break, and if they fail (ive seen plenty in my experience) can help cause abnormal temps. It's unneeded risk and at minimum makes the board look cheap.
 
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Exactly, and anyone who says different is obviously inexperienced. The fans can get noisy/dusty quickly, easily break, and if they fail (ive seen plenty in my experience) can help cause abnormal temps. It's unneeded risk and at minimum makes the board look cheap.

They are not ideal but it’s also certainly not as dramatic as you are making it sound. If you keep your system clean/free of dust they shouldn’t fail. While they can be loud these fans on the Asrock board weren’t. In most cases the fans won’t be needed as the case fans will provide enough air-flow over the board. But since Asrock can’t count on everyone having a well setup case the small fans were needed as a precaution.
 
While they can be loud these fans on the Asrock board weren’t. .
That doesn't mean they won't be over time as they get used, even when cleaned. I've seen it happen on several mobo's and GPU's. Only some "ball bearing" fans are proven IMO. I am not against this board but there is no doubt the onboard fan will turn off many customers and IMO its unneeded & cheap. Is that dramatic? Lol.
 
I don't understand why this is a problem, I mean fans on a board just mean slightly lower temps on the chip-sets and mosfets. I mean its like steve said,
In most cases the fans won’t be needed as the case fans will provide enough air-flow over the board. But since Asrock can’t count on everyone having a well setup case the small fans were needed as a precaution.
.

The fans are just a bonus, but even if unplugged them from the motherboard, its still the standard Z87 chipset (Well of course there's the extras that are added on the board added by AsRock) so I highly doubt there would be a temperature problem without them. Alot of the top tier LGA 2011 boards have them yet there are also boards from the same lineup that don't contain the fans as well. So I honestly doubt these fans were needed, but I like the fact AsRock included something like that for extended life of the motherboard components.
 
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