Friday, August 22nd 2014
ASRock Shares Pictures of Its X99 Extreme6 LGA2011 Motherboard
Today ASRock decided to show off yet another (last week it revealed the X99X Killer, X99M Killer and X99 WS) motherboard based on the Intel X99 chipset, the X99 Extreme6. This board, like the X99 WS, has a black and blue color theme and it features support for Haswell-E processors, eight DDR4 memory slots (for up to 128 GB of RAM), ten SATA 6.0 Gbps ports and one Ultra (PCIe 3.0 x4) M.2 connector, plus three PCI-Express x16 slots allowing SLI or CrossFire multi-GPU setups.
ASRock's creation also has 7.1 channel Purity Sound 2 audio, dual Gigabit Ethernet (includes one Intel NIC), two USB 2.0 and six USB 3.0 ports on the back panel plus another connector on the PCB near the DDR4 slots, one eSATA connector, and a debug LED. The X99 Extreme6 is expected to be officially launched next week.
ASRock's creation also has 7.1 channel Purity Sound 2 audio, dual Gigabit Ethernet (includes one Intel NIC), two USB 2.0 and six USB 3.0 ports on the back panel plus another connector on the PCB near the DDR4 slots, one eSATA connector, and a debug LED. The X99 Extreme6 is expected to be officially launched next week.
11 Comments on ASRock Shares Pictures of Its X99 Extreme6 LGA2011 Motherboard
I was hoping AsRock would continue with the black/gold theme they've been doing of late.... I'm quite fond of the look on my Z77 board.
Besides, it's only the Extreme6. The coloring will become more extreme with the upper models ;)
The largest one is cost. USB3.0 controllers cost a lot more than USB2.0 controllers.
Plus most of the USB2.0 ports are built right into the chipset. They don't put as many USB3.0 controllers on the chipset because USB3.0 controllers take up a lot more silicon space.
Finally, native OS support for USB3.0 is terrible. So a lot of the time the USB3.0 ports simply won't work until you install the driver. So if a board had nothing but USB3.0 ports, you'd have no keyboard/mouse to install the OS and driver. Granted, this issue is worked around on some boards that do have only USB3.0 ports on the back by having a specific pair of ports that function in generic USB2.0 mode so the native drivers will work to allow you to install the OS and then they switch to USB3.0 mode when the proper driver is loaded.
Extreme 6 is if anything slightly shafted version of WS. Chopped 1 Intel NIC for some cheaper fudge, chopped full size PCI-Ex slots for less powerful versions, added 2 extra USB 3 (instead 2.0) ports are not important at all.
It will be good giggle if they sell it for more than WS.
Perhaps Ex6 has some nitty-gritty thingy which will appeal to overclockers running benchmarks 24/7/365(6), but for real work - WS anytime, anywhere.
Not entirely sure about need to upgrade my X58, but if I do ASRock X99 WS (not Extreme6) is on top of my list (for sure it will be cheaper than over-hyped/priced Asus).