Introduction

Several weeks ago, we took a look at a few FM2 boards by a couple different manufacturers, with the Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 clearly being meant for overclocking. With FM2 being such an affordable platform, and with very decent GPU performance for your dollar, it's no surprise to me that Gigabyte isn't the only OEM with an overclocking board for this platform. I have many fond memories of grabbing a cheap AMD chip on a Friday night and clocking the crap out of it all weekend long, only to do it all again a week later. With tweaking on Intel platforms being a bit limited, AMD definitely stands out right now, since they offer a lot of user-specific adjustments to clocks that can potentially improve performance, even if it is only by a few percent.

We had so many readers requesting I cover ASRock products early this year that I asked W1zzard to make contact during last year's Computex, and I have, since then, covered many ASRock products that really set themselves apart from similar products on the market. I'll never forget the ASRock X79 Extreme11: a board with a built-in LSI SAS controller and not just one, but two PLX PEX8487 PCIe 3.0 bridge chips. It also featured a VRM that let me push my Intel i7 3960X CPU further for daily usage than any other motherboard. I cannot forget the ASRock Z77 OC Formula either - such a good board. The worst comment I could come up with was that the choice of yellow and gold was overly garish. With that in mind, it's clear to me that ASRock's hardware engineers are definitely on top of their game.

Several weeks ago, ASRock contacted me, letting me know that they had an FM2 sample, the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6, ready to be shipped to me. The ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 is obviously ASRock's high-end overclocking option for FM2, and given that their past clocking products impressed me so much, I was quite eager to get my hands on this one too. After so many good products from ASRock in my house, I do expect quite a bit from the ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 - the question is, does it deliver?

Specifications